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You grow something locally, so the argument goes, and the carbon footprint of transporting that food to a dinner plate is far less than shipping it halfway around the world.   The argument is a common one made by the slow food movement.   Food miles, they claim, or the distance food travels between production and consumption, determines greenhouse gas emissions. Better to keep them to a minimum.

But a recent article by UofT professor Pierre Desrochers and economic consultant Hiroko Shimizu suggests this logic is flawed.  Among the highlights: in the UK a consumer driving six miles to buy Kenyan green beans emits more carbon per bean than flying them from Kenya to the United Kingdom; also in the UK,  tomato production requires heated greenhouses, in Spain they do not- the result is UK tomatoes emit 2,394 kg of CO2/ton compared to 630 kg/ton for Spanish tomatoes, their transportation included.

I asked Bill Rees of UBC’s School of Community Planning what he thought of the argument and he pointed out they do have a point.

“Some years ago one of my students compared BC green-house (hydroponic) tomato production with field farm production and found that the green-house crops used 14-20 times as much energy, fertilizers, maintenance material/energy (for the green-houses) per unit produced, as did field farms.”

A big difference.  And one Rees thinks is big enough to mean a field tomato shipped in bulk from Mexico or California would have a smaller eco-footprint than locally-grown greenhouse products.

Fair enough.  But does this mean all local food is bad for the environment?

Not necessarily, says the report’s author, Pierre Desrochers.

“Local food generally makes economic and environmental sense when people are willing to pay for it because of attributes other than the fact that it was grown in close proximity.”

Like what?  According to him, if the food is good and fresh.

“In-season [local] produce that tastes fresher/better and are priced competitively when compared with the alternatives available at that moment in the local market [are going to be better for the environment],” he told me.  “The same produce, however, might not make sense six months later after having been stored in a refrigerated warehouse when it has to compete against Californian or southern hemisphere competitors (which will be typically fresher and less expensive).”

So the point is not to buy local for the sake of it being local, but for the sake of it being cheaper or better.

Nothing too new, if you read the Tyee’s online series on the hundred mile diet and this article in particular, which effectively echoes Desrocher’s point. You can eat locally without doing more harm than good.  But you need to plan based on the seasons. It means eating green tomatoes in the spring, canning them for the winter to avoid refrigration. Knowing whether or not a greenhouse was used.

All of this begs the question why we don’t have labels on our food telling us this, including how much carbon was produced in its production.   The notion isn’t that hare brained, and is being adopted in England according to this article. But then again they already have labels for genetically modified food, something we don’t even have here in Canada, allegedly because it would be too hard to come up with enforceable labels. Desrochers echoes the argument.

“To be honest, they strike me as very arbitrary and simply impossible to document for all the product we have to deal with (where do you set the boundaries of your analysis? How can you factor in everything?).”

What that leaves  us with is their prices.

“Although they’re not perfect, I believe that prices convey enough information to make informed choices in most cases (they factor in all sorts of trade-offs after all.)”

But what’s in a price?

While it may include the cost of transportation and the amount of energy used in producing food, it does not include other environmental and social costs, according to Geoff Andrews‘ new book, the Slow Food Story.  The global standardization of produce and food has led to the domination of fast food chains and big agribusiness at the expense of the small producer.  The cost is a lost identity, a dumbing down of culture and the loss of local artisanship, or as the French would say terroir.

Bill Rees also added that there are many other local benefits of supporting local agriculture as well.    It diversifies the economy, adds to our agricultural self-reliance, which can be a good thing if offshore suppliers fail, and adds value to agricultural land, which can help prevent sprawl.

“We are often cajoled into making decisions based on one or two variables or values,” he told me. “Globalization and trade, for example, are sold almost exclusively on the basis of the apparent efficiencies associated with specialization–do just one or two things well and you will earn enough money to buy from someone else all the things you no longer do. And, by the way, total or global production will increase, creating more wealth for everyone.”

But that logic is oversimplified, says Rees.

“Overspecialization leaves the producer out to dry if specialized markets fail; it deskills whole populations and deprives communities of economic diversity (which might be valuable during downturns such as we are now experiencing).”

I thought of my hometown Prince George, its reliance on cutting trees, and how susceptible it is to economic downturns when lumber is no longer demanded.  I also thought of Jane Jacobs’ book The Nature of Economies and how her ecological take on economics makes the case that diversifying your economy is akin to self-refueling.

Rees makes the same point. “Whatever happened to self-reliance as a virtue and import displacement as an economic development strategy?”

The case for local food, he told me, and the reduction of food miles, isn’t just about efficiency.  Its about the uncertainties of our environment and the need to think ahead.

“I suspect that if the future unfolds as expected we will rue the short-term economic logic that allows local agriculture to disappear for want of markets and paves over the most productive land in the country. We may need it and soon. These may be at least as strong arguments for buying and eating locally as any purely ecological ones.”

James Steidle

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