Food’s Carbon Footprint
Twenty years or so ago, premium pre-packaged pineapple from Ghana began appearing on the shelves of Waitrose supermarkets in London. Advertised on the label as helping to fund smallholder community projects in Ghana, the pineapple’s appeal lay in its being unusually sweet and juicy. This was apparently due in large part to the local climate in Ghana being drier than that in many other pineapple-producing areas and thus concentrating sweetness in the fruit. The pineapple was hand-picked, trimmed, and packaged in Ghana, helping to keep more of the value chain in-country and support the villages where the pineapple was grown. It was then refrigerated and flown to London, where it was finally displayed on the shelves of Waitrose. It was a “win-win” equation: the consumer got especially delicious pineapple, and the producing communities got a fair deal.
At the time, the “carbon footprint” of the pineapple would have been only an afterthought, and only for a few people. Today, the question should be front and center.
The ongoing revision of global supply chains could have some positive effects in terms of carbon reduction. Long, globalized supply chains are being deconstructed and revised, in part because long supply chains mean high energy costs for transport. This accelerated during the pandemic, although it has larger causes, including global geopolitical splintering and concerns for national security. Reshoring, near-shoring, and supply-chain simplification to emphasize robustness over efficiency are the focus today. But when carbon is part of this, it is mostly as an afterthought.
The dichotomy between economic development and climate issues is becoming more widely recognized. As Martin Wolf observed recently in the Financial Times:
The question of development assistance links with the challenge of climate. As everyone in developing countries knows, the reason the climate problem is now urgent is the historic emissions of high-income countries. The latter were able to use the atmosphere as a sink, while today’s developing countries cannot. So, today we tell them they must embark on a very different development path from our own. Needless to say, this is quite infuriating. Nevertheless, emissions must now be sharply reduced. This requires a global effort, including in many emerging and developing countries. Have we made progress on this task, in reality rather than rhetorically? The answer is “no.” Emissions have not fallen at all.
Wolf goes on to say that emissions must decline rapidly “while emerging and developing countries still deliver the prosperity that their populations demand,” and he reminds us that this will require a huge flow of resources towards them. “Countries with above average emissions per head [should] compensate those with below average ones,” and “high-income democracies are failing to offer adequate help in this, just as they did over Covid.”
This is factually accurate and morally valid. But is it realistic?
Even within democracies, the better-off seldom want, en masse, to help the worse-off, unless and until it becomes a matter of specific self-interest or even self-preservation and government policy leaves them no choice. By now, only the foolish or willfully ignorant would dismiss the possibility that high-income countries may themselves in the future need to survive with fewer resources—possibly with far fewer—across all socio-economic levels. So there may overall be less to spread around. Whatever lifestyle improvements and development that populations expect or demand in rich and in not-so-rich countries, it may simply not be possible to fulfill this. Many well-informed and intelligent individuals seem to have a strange blind spot about even admitting this as a possibility. It may be too emotionally painful to come to terms with a future that looks so much bleaker than the present or the recent past. Yet the abundance that globalization made possible, whether in delicious pineapple and other foods or in affordable apparel and electronics, cannot easily be squared with either decarbonization or reshoring.
Moreover, the extant systems that have been developed for global or even national redistribution of material assets—which is what Wolf is talking about—are far too inefficient and far too prone to corruption on both the transferring and receiving sides of the equation. Astonishing inefficiency occurs every day, even when redistribution is not being attempted: in the US we waste 30 to 40 percent of our food, for example, while 800 million people go to bed hungry around the world every night. Those on the deficit end of this imbalance are aware of the problem, and of course it is the source of enormous anger. As climate change makes agriculture less predictable, with dramatic effects for those least able to withstand food shortages, that anger will get worse.