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Why do we ship food so far? It is really odd. Is it truly "market forces"?
The
U.S. is a net food importer. Our farmers are losing domestic
market share of the U.S. consumer's food intake. The same is
happening for U.S. manufacturers. It defies logic to see how
$120/barrel oil is not a tremendous barrier to imports.
Asian currency manipulation and foreign value added taxes produce much of the incentive to ship this food so far.
It
is 6,000 miles from Beijing to Kansas City. How much fuel is
used? How much pollution is produced? The answer is quite a
lot. The economics may be shifting with the high oil prices, so much
that foreign protectionism cannot overcome it.
But the environmental cost is starting to be addressed on the transportation side.
Cod caught off Norway is shipped to China to be turned into
filets, then shipped back to Norway for sale. Argentine lemons fill
supermarket shelves on the Citrus Coast of Spain, as local lemons rot
on the ground. Half of Europe’s peas are grown and packaged in Kenya.
In the United States, FreshDirect proclaims kiwi season has expanded to
“All year!” now that Italy has become the world’s leading supplier of
New Zealand’s national fruit, taking over in the Southern Hemisphere’s
winter.
So what is happening?
Under longstanding trade agreements, fuel for international
freight carried by sea and air is not taxed. Now, many economists,
environmental advocates and politicians say it is time to make shippers
and shoppers pay for the pollution, through taxes or other measures.
“We’re shifting goods around the world in a way that looks really
bizarre,” said Paul Watkiss, an Oxford University economist who wrote a
recent European Union report on food imports. ...
Europe is poised to change that. This year the European Commission
in Brussels announced that all freight-carrying flights into and out of
the European Union would be included in the trading bloc’s
emissions-trading program by 2012, meaning permits will have to be
purchased for the pollution they generate.
An interesting idea.
“This may be as radical for environmental consuming as putting a
calorie count on the side of packages to help people who want to lose
weight,” a spokesman for Tesco, Trevor Datson, said.
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