Local food no green panacea: professor

There are lots of reasons somebody might want to buy local food — freshness, distinct flavour, or even a desire to keep their dollars in their own community. "But if you're doing it to save the planet," University of Toronto professor Pierre Desrochers says, "you're being misguided." The concept of "food miles" — the distance food has travelled from production to consumption — has been adopted as the best way of gauging a food's environmental impact. "People who've never been involved in agricultural production tend to minimize the requirements," he says. Only about 10 per cent of the energy consumed in food production is related to transportation. "So to argue that the closer you are to your food, the better, is a real over-simplification." He uses the example of strawberries. Highly efficient farms in California produce roughly 17 times as many strawberries as a typical Ontario producer using the same amount of land and resources. "When you're that efficient you can invest in better handling and storage," he says. "The environmental impact of transportation isn't very significant." Moving that food to consumers via highly efficient rail, ocean freight or even comparatively costly air is a better move, environmentally, than trying to re-create the ideal growing conditions for the fruit in Canada, he says. His paper is full of similar examples. European studies found that British farmers emit 2,394 kilograms of carbon dioxide for every tonne of tomatoes they produce. But Spanish farmers produce only 630 kilograms of carbon dioxide for the same amount. The real enemies of environmentally conscious food consumers, he says, are food subsidies that encourage agricultural production in certain areas for the wrong reasons. An Environmental Assessment Institute report put the total value of environmental subsidies at $376 billion worldwide in 2006. Barriers like that, Desrochers's paper says, "end up being harmful to both the environment and the economy."...CBCNews