The Triple Bottom Line Blog

Check out this excellent article from the New York Times about the environmental costs of shipping foodstuffs around the globe. It's filled with remarkable facts like these:

Cod caught off Norway is shipped to China to be turned into filets, then shipped back to Norway for sale. Argentine lemons fill supermarket shelves on the Citrus Coast of Spain, as local lemons rot on the ground. Half of Europe's peas are grown and packaged in Kenya.

In the United States, FreshDirect proclaims kiwi season has expanded to "All year!" now that Italy has become the world's leading supplier of New Zealand's national fruit, taking over in the Southern Hemisphere's winter.

But perhaps the most revealing paragraph of the article is this one, which helps to explain why it (counter-intuitively) makes economic sense for food processing firms to move stuff from one continent to another:

Under a little-known international treaty called the Convention on International Civil Aviation, signed in Chicago in 1944 to help the fledgling airline industry, fuel for international travel and transport of goods, including food, is exempt from taxes, unlike trucks, cars and buses. There is also no tax on fuel used by ocean freighters.

Get that? Shipping foods around the world is not some market-tested, economically efficient business strategy developed in response to consumer demand. It's actually the perverse result of an indirect subsidy originally created for an entirely different purpose more than half a century ago.

Free-market fundamentalists often criticize environmentalists (and other non-fundamentalists) for wanting to interfere with the natural, unfettered workings of the economy, which are supposed to embody some quasi-mystical perfection. Their argument would carry more weight if those supposedly simon-pure markets hadn't already been endlessly tinkered with in order to tilt the playing field in favor of one business interest or another.

Labels: Food and Agriculture, Role of Government, Supply Chain