The Challenges of the Food System: What is the fuss with New Zealand apples?
Yesterday I attended a Food Seminar organised by a team of researchers at St. Andrews University in collaboration with Fife Council. The main aim of the seminar was to explore How can Local Authorities (and Fife Council in particular) help Communities Recover Sustainable Food Systems and so reduce our carbon emissions and create resilience in the face of the energy and economic crunch.
We were asked to give a contribution as One Planet Food, and to make it more real and accessible for the Fife Council we focused on the challenges of the food system informed by data we have gathered for the Fife region. We also gave the council practical ideas and proposed next steps of what it could be done in order to have a more sustainable food system, within the current climate of budget cuts (see our presentations attached, the data presented for the Fife region is part of a One Planet Food publication in progress, so please do contact us if you need to reproduce this information). FoodSeminar.ppt, nourishing communities.ppt
This seminar was the third of a series that focuses on how the council can help communities to reduce green house gas emissions (ghe). The first two seminars looked at Energy and Transport and the third one was Food. These are the three main contributors to climate change and if the Fife council wants to achieve its aim of becoming the greenest council in Scotland, it cannot overlook the impact of the food chain on climate change and vice versa. The current food system is responsible for 19% of the GHE emissions produced in UK, and agriculture alone contributes to approximately 50% of this. Meat and diary accounts for half of the emissions attributed to the food chain.
As One Planet Food we brought to the table the idea of the complexity of the food system and its challenges and the need to look at the food system from a holistic point of view. For example, there are studies analysing the sustainability of agricultural systems, trying to determine the relative energy intensity of domestic fruits and vegetables compared with those produced overseas, based on variables like seasonality and storage time. So what this means for someone living in Scotland, is it more energy efficient to eat an apple from Europe in winter and from New Zealand in summer in spite of the extra food miles of the New Zealand apple? This could be so in some cases, but the shift to consume more local and sustainable food should not be guided only by the contribution to climate change of a specific product.
We were asked to give a contribution as One Planet Food, and to make it more real and accessible for the Fife Council we focused on the challenges of the food system informed by data we have gathered for the Fife region. We also gave the council practical ideas and proposed next steps of what it could be done in order to have a more sustainable food system, within the current climate of budget cuts (see our presentations attached, the data presented for the Fife region is part of a One Planet Food publication in progress, so please do contact us if you need to reproduce this information). FoodSeminar.ppt, nourishing communities.ppt
This seminar was the third of a series that focuses on how the council can help communities to reduce green house gas emissions (ghe). The first two seminars looked at Energy and Transport and the third one was Food. These are the three main contributors to climate change and if the Fife council wants to achieve its aim of becoming the greenest council in Scotland, it cannot overlook the impact of the food chain on climate change and vice versa. The current food system is responsible for 19% of the GHE emissions produced in UK, and agriculture alone contributes to approximately 50% of this. Meat and diary accounts for half of the emissions attributed to the food chain.
As One Planet Food we brought to the table the idea of the complexity of the food system and its challenges and the need to look at the food system from a holistic point of view. For example, there are studies analysing the sustainability of agricultural systems, trying to determine the relative energy intensity of domestic fruits and vegetables compared with those produced overseas, based on variables like seasonality and storage time. So what this means for someone living in Scotland, is it more energy efficient to eat an apple from Europe in winter and from New Zealand in summer in spite of the extra food miles of the New Zealand apple? This could be so in some cases, but the shift to consume more local and sustainable food should not be guided only by the contribution to climate change of a specific product.
Urgent and important as it is to move to less oil-hungry food in an era of oil reserves decline, the benefits of Local and Sustainable Food go far beyond the energy debate and are at the heart of initiatives that look to improve our health and nutrition and to create more cohesive and resilient communities.
Drawing from the data we have produced for our upcoming report of the Food System in the Fife region we know we are self-sufficient in Fife for the main staples (vegetables, fruit, cereals), in other words most of what we consume in Fife could be produced here, and so there is a great opportunity for a more re-localised food system in the region. However, at the moment the local food market (represented by Fife’s farmers market and farm shops) accounts for only 0.53% of the total food sales in Fife, while 79.5% of the spending in food is in the hands of the main supermarkets.
There are many ideas on the table to change this system and we invite you to add more, for example:
Community right to grow: Use developer contributions and community land bonds to work with communities to acquire and safeguard new common land for growing
Support food mutuals: Work with credit unions to develop community procurement of staple products (eggs, potatoes, veg, cereals, apples, soft fruit, milk, meat?) from local farms and fish from the harbour.
Drawing from the data we have produced for our upcoming report of the Food System in the Fife region we know we are self-sufficient in Fife for the main staples (vegetables, fruit, cereals), in other words most of what we consume in Fife could be produced here, and so there is a great opportunity for a more re-localised food system in the region. However, at the moment the local food market (represented by Fife’s farmers market and farm shops) accounts for only 0.53% of the total food sales in Fife, while 79.5% of the spending in food is in the hands of the main supermarkets.
There are many ideas on the table to change this system and we invite you to add more, for example:
Community right to grow: Use developer contributions and community land bonds to work with communities to acquire and safeguard new common land for growing
Support food mutuals: Work with credit unions to develop community procurement of staple products (eggs, potatoes, veg, cereals, apples, soft fruit, milk, meat?) from local farms and fish from the harbour.
Add a Comment
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Comment by Susan Pettie on May 7, 2010 at 19:42 -
Great ideas, great news that Fife is listening, and so amazing you are there with the information to make it easier to change.
We discussed this idea of something like food mutuals on a Highlands & Islands, Social Enterprise funded 'Rural Leadership Program' last year. Mostly 'traditional' farmers, large farms, heavily reliant on EU funding. The dairy contingent there (from the North East) were under so much pressure from super markets ripping the arse out the price of milk they were looking out for new ways of thinking about it. How about communities buy cows and cut out the middle man all together?
What was needed to make this idea possible was support to get a pilot off the ground and more dialogue between the commercial and the community sector.
May it be so. x
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