Food miles are a form of protectionism

photo credit: zarzoso

The Soil Association’s decision to discriminate against “organic” food which is air-freighted into the country is just a form of old-style agricultural protectionism. As the Kenyan High Commissioner points out, carbon emissions from his country’s food producers are much less per vegetable than those of British organic farmers - even if you factor in the COi generated by flying - because Kenyan farmers use manual labour, not tractors, and compost rather than organic fertilisers.

Yet the Soil Association persists with the idea that there is no case for a global trade in food for things that we can produce ourselves. This is the classic argument put by British landowners for the extortion of a monopoly rent from captive local consumers - the sort of thinking that led to the creation of the Icelandic banana industry, which saw local landowners produce fabulously expensive bananas in gigantic hothouses.

The middle-class neurosis about food miles is being exploited to protect an archaic form of agriculture which penalises consumers and harms Third World producers.

It’s time we recognised it.