British bury food miles

It would appear British shoppers are a savvy lot. According to research findings released by AgResearch and given wide media coverage here, British shoppers are not ‘concerned’ about food miles.

Rather, they are more interested in the price of their fresh food than where it comes from.

While I have no research to back up my belief, I suspect New Zealand shoppers are of pretty much the same mind.

The life cycle of the food miles concept is interesting.

Born in the UK in the 1990s on the back of conceptual papers about carbon generation, by 2005 the theory had got legs and was causing us concerns that it could become a barrier to our European food exports.

Lincoln University dampened enthusiasm for it in 2006 with a study that compared the total energy used to produce food in Europe and New Zealand. In 2009 the Australian Bureau of Agriculture added its weight with the statement that it was a ‘misleading indicator of the carbon footprint of foods’.

Then, this year, AgResearch demonstrated that getting NZ lamb from a British supermarket to the consumer’s home added more to the carbon footprint than all the transportation involved getting the lamb from the NZ farm gate to the British supermarket.

And now we have the coup de grace delivered by the British shopper - they are not interested anyway. It makes you wonder whether they ever were!

As a footnote, the Acting British High Commissioner made the UK’s position on food miles pretty clear in an address he gave in Wellington in June when he said “… we are not interested in food miles. Our approach has been on establishing analysis of the carbon dioxide emissions associated with production, consumption and disposal. If the sums add up, there’s nothing wrong with consuming products from around the globe. This is the UK’s policy.”

It is a comment that appears to have escaped the attention of the media.

Ask, don’t demand, and we may be pleasantly surprised at the result

At the start of February one farmer, falling back on the argument of his property rights, delayed the fire service and electricity repair crews gaining access to his property, contributing to a major, day-long power disruption across the Auckland region. It caused chaos.

Putting aside the rights and wrongs of the dispute itself, it is a timely reminder that when it comes to civil laws, and local authority regulations and rules, upholding them can be thrown into turmoil when a determined landowner digs their toes in and says ‘no’.

There is no quick fix in such situations, and imagine the consequences if there are hundreds or thousands of landowners saying no at the same time. The impasse would be monumental.

My experiences in relation to this type of issue revolves around local authorities moving to gain increasing amounts of farm specific data to ensure farmers are meeting their environmental requirements under the Resource Management Act and Regional Plans.

Those local authorities that take the attitude the ‘law requires us to do this’ or resort to legal action to force third parties to release information they hold on individual farms, may achieve short-term compliance but their actions create the potential for long-term confrontation.

The real answer to achieving compliance lies in good communication, listening to and respecting opposing points of view, addressing genuine concerns and gaining buy in on the basis of the greater good.

It is far more effective to get people to do things voluntarily than it is to force them to comply.

Achieving consensus and co-operation may take longer, but around the world there is a realisation that collaborative governance achieves better outcomes and greater co-operation than the adversarial approach.