Food distribution: Difference between revisions

The food distribution or supply chain of food determines the price of food, and the revenue that can be attained by the many parties that form the supply chain. Not every party receives an equally large percentage of the final price demanded to the consumer (which forms the last link). Moreover, parties that need to perform more work are often a greater portion of the revenue than the others (especially the traders attain a higher revenue).

Makeup of the agricultural supply chain

• Producers (farmers)
• Processors and manufacturers
• Retailers and exporters
• Consumers

Disavantages of long supply chains

Substantial climate-disrupting carbon emissions^W, boosted by the transport of food over long distances, are of growing concern as the world faces such global crisis^W as natural resource depletion, peak oil and climate change.^[1] “The average American meal currently costs about 1500 miles, and takes about 10 calories^W of oil and other fossil fuels to produce a single calorie of food.” ^[2] Buying food from local farmers reduces the distance the food has to travel and so also reduces carbon offsets.

Another disadvantage of centralised (large-scale) food distribution systems is that the control of quality is increasingly decided by the middlemen while a local food system redevelops these relationships and encourage a return of quality control to the consumer and the producer respectively. These quality characteristics are not only in the product but in the method of producing.^[3]

Reducing the number of links in the chain

Besides the environmental advantages, reducing the distance by producing the food locally also allows economical advantages for the people in the supply chain. This as the longer the distance that needs to be travelled, the longer the chain and the less revenue can be made by each party. This can be done as less retailers and importers/exporters are needed. This, as the price of a specific product is often legally bound to not exceed a specific value (this is especially true for prices of staple crops, ...). This as greater revenue can be attained by the people that actually do the most work (ie farmers, processors, ...). In addition, systems could potentially be made that fixes the revenue attained from the consumer to a fairer percentage, in line with the needed work.

By contrast, "Fair trade" does not look at the entire supply chain but focuses only on the farmer (and not the additional links in the chain). It also entirely disregards the market mechanism, paying a minimum sum to farmers even if the product sold to the consumer does not allow such a great amount of revenue to be given to the first link (so even taking into account the greater amount of work needed). In a proper market mechanism, no minimum sums are given, and a given sector completely goes bankrupt if there is no demand for the product anymore. This in effect, cleans out the "badly functioning sectors" and gives room for new emerging services to come on stage.

Global food transport

Because we are capable of transporting food relatively quickly, a variety of food is available to the consumer that would not be available to consumers if they were to rely only upon locally produced food. We are able to eat soy beans form china, avocado from southern America, and sugar from Hawaii. These are only a few examples of what is available to us due to modern technology. Many plants are only able to grow in a certain region of the globe, but because of the speed in which we are able to transport things, we are able to eat things which would have gone bad had they had to been transferred by hand, horse or other means.

Local food production

Local food production is part of the concept of local purchasing^W and local economies^W, a preference to buy locally produced goods and services. Those who prefer to eat locally grown/produced food sometimes call themselves "localvores" or locavores.^[4]

The local or regional food movement is a "collaborative effort to build more locally based, self-reliant food economies - one in which sustainable food production, processing, distribution, and consumption is integrated to enhance the economic, environmental and social health of a particular place"^[5] and is considered to be a part of the broader sustainability^W movement.

There has been considerable debate about where farms are best located. Many environmentalists advocate urban developments with high population density as a way of preserving agricultural land and maximizing energy efficiency. However, others have theorized that sustainable ecocities, or ecovillages which combine habitation and farming with close proximity between producers and consumers, may provide greater sustainability.

The use of available city space (e.g., rooftop gardens^W, community gardens, garden sharing^W, and other forms of urban agriculture for cooperative food production is another way to achieve greater sustainability.

One of the latest ideas in achieving sustainable agricultural involves shifting the production of food plants from major factory farming operations to large, urban, technical facilities called vertical farms. The advantages of vertical farming include year-round production, isolation from pests and diseases, controllable resource recycling, and on-site production that reduces transportation costs. While a vertical farm has yet to become a reality, the idea is gaining momentum among those who believe that current sustainable farming methods will be insufficient to provide for a growing global population.^[6]

Criticism of local food production

Critics of the local food movement point out that transport is only one component of the total environmental impact of food production and consumption. In fact, any environmental assessment of food that consumers buy needs to take into account how the food has been produced and what energy is used in its production. For example, it is likely to be more environmentally friendly for tomatoes to be grown in Spain and transported to the UK than for the same tomatoes to be grown in greenhouses in the UK requiring electricity to light and heat them. The solutions to this though would be either using low impact energy sources on the greenhouses, such a solar, geothermal or wind, or to switch to eating seasonally.

A study by Lincoln University^W of Christchurch, New Zealand^W challenges claims about food miles by comparing total energy used in food production in Europe and New Zealand, taking into account energy used to ship the food to Europe for consumers^[7]

New Zealand has greater production efficiency in many food commodities compared to the UK. For example New Zealand agriculture tends to apply less fertilizers (which require large amounts of energy to produce and cause significant CO2 emissions) and animals are able to graze year round outside eating grass instead large quantities of brought-in feed such as concentrates. In the case of dairy and sheep meat production NZ is by far more energy efficient even including the transport cost than the UK, twice as efficient in the case of dairy, and four times as efficient in case of sheep meat. In the case of apples NZ is more energy efficient even though the energy embodied in capital items and other inputs data was not available for the UK.

An August 6, 2007 article in The New York Times gave examples of how eating locally grown food sometimes causes an increase, instead of a decrease, in the carbon footprint. As one example, the article stated, "... lamb raised on New Zealand’s clover-choked pastures and shipped 11,000 miles by boat to Britain produced 1,520 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions per ton while British lamb produced 6,280 pounds of carbon dioxide per ton, in part because poorer British pastures force farmers to use feed. In other words, it is four times more energy-efficient for Londoners to buy lamb imported from the other side of the world than to buy it from a producer in their backyard."^[8]

According to a study by engineers Christopher Weber and H. Scott Matthews of Carnegie Mellon University^W, of all the greenhouse gases emitted by the food industry, only 4% comes from transporting the food from producers to retailers. The study also concluded that adopting a vegetarian^W diet, even if the vegetarian food is transported over very long distances, does far more to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, than does eating a locally grown diet.^[9]

External links

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_chain
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_marketing
• Wikipedia:Local food

References

• http://blog.oup.com/2007/11/locavore/
• http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1200783,00.html
• http://media.www.thejackonline.org/media/storage/paper1142/news/2007/09/26/Culture/250-Mile.Long.Potluck-2982205.shtml
• http://www.richsoil.com/permaculture/170-podcat-017-food-matters-cancer-local-organic-nutrition-toilets-water/