If you think you can make the planet better by clever
shopping, think again. You might make it worse. You probably go
shopping several times a month, providing yourself with lots of opportunities to
express your opinions. If you are worried about the environment, you might buy
organic food; if you want to help poor farmers, you can do your bit by buying
Fairtrade products; or you can express a dislike of evil multinational companies
and rampant globalization by buying only local produce. And the best bit is that
shopping, unlike voting, is fun; so you can do good and enjoy yourself at the
same time. Sadly, it’s not that easy. (41) .
People who want to make the world a better place cannot do so by shifting their
shopping habits: transforming the planet requires duller disciplines, like
politics. Organic food, which is grown without man-made
pesticides and fertilisers, is generally assumed to be more environmentally
friendly than conventional intensive farming, which is heavily reliant on
chemical inputs. But it all depends on what you mean by "environmentally
friendly". Farming is inherently bad for the environment: since humans took it
up around 11 000 years ago, the result has been deforestation on a massive
scale. (42) . Organic methods, which rely on
crop rotation, manure and compost in place of fertiliser, are far less
intensive. So producing the world’s current agricultural output organically
would require several times as much land as is currently cultivated. There
wouldn’t be much room left for the rainforest. Fairtrade food is
designed to raise poor farmers’ incomes. It is sold at a higher price than
ordinary food, with a subsidy passed back to the farmer. But prices of
agricultural commodities are low because of overproduction, (43)
. Surely the case for local food, produced as close as
possible to the consumer in order to minimise "food miles" and, by extension,
carbon emissions, is clear Surprisingly, it is not. A study of Britain’s food
system found that nearly half of food-vehicle miles (i. e. , miles travelled by
vehicles carrying food) were driven by cars going to and from the shops. Most
people live closer to a supermarket than a farmer’s market, so more local food
could mean more food-vehicle miles. Moving food around in big, carefully packed
lorries, as supermarkets do, may in fact be the most efficient way to transport
the stuff What’s more, once the energy used in production as
well as transport is taken into account, local food may turn out to be even less
green. (44) . And the local-food movement’s aims, of course,
contradict those of the Fairtrade movement, by discouraging rich-country
consumers from buying poor-country produce. But since the local-food movement
looks suspiciously like old-fashioned protectionism masquerading as concern for
the environment, helping poor countries is presumably not the point. (45) . The problems lie in the means, not the ends.
The best thing about the spread of the ethical-food movement is that it offers
grounds for hope. It sends a signal that there is an enormous appetite for
change and widespread frustration that governments are not doing enough to
preserve the environment, reform world trade or encourage development. [A]
The aims of much of the ethical-food movement--to protect the environment, to
encourage development and to redress the distortions in global trade--are
admirable. [B] By maintaining the price, the Fairtrade system encourages
farmers to produce more of these commodities rather than diversifying into other
crops and so depresses prices--thus achieving, for most farmers, exactly the
opposite of what the initiative is intended to do. [C] Proper free trade
would be by far the best way to help,poor farmers. Taxing carbon would price the
cost of emissions into the price of goods, and retailers would then have an
incentive to source locally if it saved energy. [D] There are good reasons to
doubt the claims made about three of the most popular varieties of "ethical"
food: organic food, Fairtrade food and local food. [E] But following the
"green revolution" of the 1960s greater use of chemical fertiliser has tripled
grain yields with very little increase in the area of land under
cultivation. [F] And since only a small fraction of the mark-up on Fairtrade
foods actually goes to the farmer--most goes to the retailer-the system gives
rich consumers an inflated impression of their largesse and makes alleviating
poverty seem too easy. [G] Producing lamb in New Zealand and shipping it to
Britain uses less energy than producing British lamb, because fanning in New
Zealand is less energy-intensive.