Speech
Speech by Gareth Thomas, Minister for Trade and Development, at the launch
of the DFID Air-freight Seminar on September 17th 2007
17 September 2007
 Good
morning and welcome to DFID. I would like to give a special welcome to Ernest
Abloh from Blue Skies in Ghana, to Alex Kasterine from the International Trade
Centre in Geneva and to Anna Bradley from the Soil Assocation.
I would like to thank you all for coming to hear about and join in discussion
about a different side to the food miles debate - to discuss how our own efforts
here in the UK to prevent climate change might actually harm poor people in
Africa.
For consumers - for you and me - the food miles debate is a real dilemma. People
say - “I want to do my bit to stop climate change. So, should I only buy local
produce and should I boycott produce from abroad, especially produce flown in -
or should I support poor farmers to improve their income, to take care of their
families, to work and to trade their way out of poverty?”
In the UK, as you know all to well, we rely on food imports and have done for
centuries. Today, over 90% of the fruit and almost 40% of the vegetables we eat
are imported. From the 1990s, UK supermarkets have led the way in developing
African horticulture to supply our market - so UK customers can get the fresh
fruit and vegetables they need throughout the year.
As customers in the UK, we spend over £1 million a day on fruit and vegetables
from Africa and a growing amount of this money is on the high value organic
products – products that mean work for farmers and increasingly jobs for food
processors in Africa as well.
 Back
to top
Exports: An African success story
The International Trade Centre in Geneva has been looking at what the impact
of an air-freight ban would be on this trade and Alex will be sharing the early
findings from this research with us in due course.
For Africa, this export trade is a success story - it's Africa doing it for
itself - creating jobs, trading with others - and it’s one of the reasons why
African economies are growing around 5% or more.
In Africa the fresh fruit and vegetable trade means that a million African
farmers and their families benefit. Take Kenya - Kenya is a country where half
of the population live on less than 50p a day - they live in extreme poverty.
For you and I 50p means buying a small bar of chocolate for a snack, but for
Kenyans, living on 50p means not knowing in the morning where the food for their
children will come in the evening; it means putting off treatment for a sick
child because they can’t afford to pay for it.
Take the small-scale farmers who bring their beans to Kaviani shed in Machakos
District in Kenya. Each week they sow, they weed and they pick green beans and
each week they earn an income - around £20 a week - which they can spend on
their families. Not huge riches but it does mean better education and
healthcare, and yes, a house with a tin roof that doesn’t leak, a bicycle, a
radio - big changes in their standard of living from what seems a small amount
of money to us.
Back
to top
Food miles: Not a good measure of sustainability
So the challenge is how can we tackle poverty through trade without
undermining it through climate change?
To start with we need a better informed debate.
Food miles alone, or the distance food has travelled, is not a good way to judge
whether the food we eat is sustainable. Driving 6.5 miles to buy your shopping
emits more carbon than flying a pack of Kenyan greenbeans to the UK.
Air transport does have environmental impact and this is growing rapidly. But,
air-freighted fruit and vegetables from Africa account for less than one-tenth
of 1% of the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions.
But more than this, we should remember that people living in the vast majority
of African countries are responsible for a tiny amount of carbon emissions. In
Kenya, carbon emissions equate to 200 kg a head; here it is 50 times that.
If we boycott the goods of poor people in Africa that are flown to the UK we
deny our fellow human beings their chance to grow; their chance to reduce
poverty. It’s like saying, we caused the damage but you can pay the price.
Ultimately we need to move to a system where the price of the things we buy
includes their contribution to climate change – their carbon footprint.
Back
to top
Covering the costs to the environment
Living within our means will take on another meaning. It will not just be
about whether you are overdrawn at the bank, but will also be about living
within your environmental carrying capacity. It would change the way we behave,
and it will change industry and government too. In the long term, the only fair
option is to ensure that the prices of the goods we consume cover the costs of
their impact on the environment wherever they are from and however they are
produced.
I welcome Marks and Spencers and Tescos working on these issues. Their
air-freight labels help their customers understand more about what they are
buying. But they provide only partial information on the environmental impact of
the product. Air-freight labels don’t tell us about the full impact of producing
and delivering all of the products that we might buy. And if fresh fruit and
vegetable exports are helping to end poverty, shouldn’t shoppers know about that
as well? I welcome too the Co-op’s commitment, and I quote, “to reduce carbon
but never at the expense of the world’s poorest.”
Back
to top
Removing obstacles to African growth
I welcome the Soil Association’s consultation on whether to withdraw organic
certification from air-freighted produce. I understand they recognise the impact
this will have on African farmers – it’s considerable - and their consultation
has helped to get the debate going about food miles. As Alex I think will
explain, if organic certification is withdrawn from air-freighted produce it
will be farmers in developing countries that will lose out – 83% of
air-freighted organic produce is from countries where the average income is less
than £150 a month and 40% is from countries like Kenya and Ghana where average
incomes are less than £40 a month.
So we need to think that part of the food miles debate through and talk it
through – and Anna will be talking about their consultation process a little bit
later.
In conclusion let me remind us that with two-thirds of poor people in Africa
currently working on the land, agriculture remains the most likely source of
economic growth and the best means of reducing poverty. We need to remove rather
than create obstacles that African farmers face in trying to make a decent
living for themselves and their families so they can trade their way out of
poverty, and work to meet the Millennium Development Goals as well as reduce
climate change.
Back
to top
Links
 Back to top
|
Directgov |
