Food Ethics Council

The Food Ethics Council has today launched its report on air freighted food, giving detailed guidelines on how supermarkets should respond to this increasingly high profile issue.

Environmental groups highlight air freight’s impact on food’s carbon footprint, and concern over climate change has prompted calls to reduce the practice of flying food to fill supermarket shelves.
 
However, development organisations say that response could harm communities in poor countries who depend on horticultural exports, such as green beans from Kenya.
 
This report moves the debate on flying food beyond these reported conflicts between the environment and the needs of producers in poor countries.
 
The Food Ethics Council argues that retailers will see civil society groups and consumers judge their performance on this issue against increasingly clear and challenging benchmarks.
 
Our report, based on work with the environment and development groups who lead the public debate on air freight, sets out clear benchmarks for judging the credibility of supermarket attempts to reduce air freight emissions, including:
 

• Placing work on aviation in an overarching environmental strategy that focuses at least as much effort on bigger greenhouse gas hotspots than air freight (responsible for 0.3% of UK greenhouse gases), like meat and dairy production (accounting for 8%);
• Nurturing open and transparent partnerships for development, including supportive, long-term relationships with suppliers, especially in the poorest parts of the world;
• Avoiding ‘carbon hypocrisy’, where air freighted produce is replaced with more greenhouse gas-intensive substitutes, even if they have travelled fewer ‘food miles’;
• Tackling the aspects of air freight that are most widely agreed to be a problem, particularly by improved planning in order to increase flight efficiency and limit ‘emergency’ top-up, where air freight is used to fill unexpected gaps on the shelf.
• Actively supporting government intervention to reduce market barriers to sustainable behaviour, including ensuring that climate change emissions from aviation are included within UK reduction targets.

Tom MacMillan, executive director of the Food Ethics Council says:

“The debate on air freight has matured. We’re setting out steps for retailers to follow that will make the situation better for the environment, for development and for consumers.”

The report highlights the need for retailers to address wider environmental issues besides climate change, such as water scarcity, waste and biodiversity.  It urges retailers to develop measurable indicators of poverty reduction in communities that supply their products, and calls on them to bear the costs of external accreditation – such as the Fairtrade mark - for high labour standards in their own and suppliers’ operations.

It also suggests that retailers will need to work actively with their customers to challenge potentially unsustainable expectations that most fresh products will be constantly available throughout the year.

Resources

• Read the 'Flying food' report
• Read about our workshop with NGOs who have led the public debate on air freight
• View the slides that Rose Bridger(independent) presented at the NGO workshop
• View the slides that Tara Garnett(Food Climate Research Network) presented at the NGO workshop
• View the slides that Ken Hayes(Soil Association) presented at the NGO workshop
• View the slides that Bill Vorley(International Institute for Environment and Development) presented at the NGO workshop
• 'Food air freight: the global infrastructure expansion' - a paper by Rose Bridger (independent)

This works was made possible by funding from the Network for Social Change.