Farmers hit by climate change and supermarket labelling schemes

Farmers in developing countries across the Commonwealth face an uncertain future as climate change takes its toll on their lives and livelihoods.

Over successive seasons, Hasit Shah, a farmer from Kenya, has been grappling with the “double whammy” of a lack of rain and soaring temperatures.

Rivers such as the Mara, famous to television audiences as the crossing point for Africa’s wildebeest, are fast drying up, their once mud-soaked banks today cracking under the glare of the sun.

“The rains just haven’t come. We normally get two rain seasons a year, in April-May and then again in November. But the rains last year pretty much failed,” Mr Shah explains. “As a country we are now beginning to struggle quite badly.”

Worsening agricultural conditions

Enticed by the abnormal heat, insects usually confined to the plains are making their way to land hundreds of feet into the hills. These creatures lay eggs and mine into the crops, further damaging the planters’ chances of a successful harvest.

The past 18 to 24 months have been especially tough, Mr Shah sighs. “There has,” he says, “been an acceleration.”

As chair of the Fresh Produce Exporters Association of Kenya, Mr Shah was asked by the Commonwealth Secretariat to contribute to a new report on the impact of climate change on trade and sustainable development in developing countries.

Carbon footprint of freighted exports

Stemming from commitments made in the Lake Victoria Action Plan - a 2007 declaration by Commonwealth leaders which recognised climate change as a “direct threat to the very survival” of some countries - Mr Shah’s study looks at the hotly contested issue of food miles and carbon-labelling.

Proponents of the food miles agenda claim that the further fruit and vegetables are freighted from source to consumer the more damage is caused to the climate through carbon emissions from transportation by air, sea or road.

Supermarkets keen to demonstrate their concern for the environmentare turning to special labels or stickers to mark out products with a high ‘food mileage’, asserting that they are empowering consumers to make choices between items freighted in overseas or sourced more locally.

New Commonwealth report

But Mr Shah refutes the value of this “crude” form of labelling, insisting in his report that calculating carbon emissions solely on methods of transport is at best simplistic and at worst misleading.

In his view, by singling out just one part of the carbon footprint of food - namely transport - these labelling schemes are “ignoring other parts of the process”, such as emissions caused by processing, storage and purchase.

He adds that they also neglect the fact that many exporters in countries like Kenya produce “goods with lower carbon emissions as compared to their counterparts in developed countries, which produce out-of-season vegetables in a highly mechanised fashion in greenhouses using large amounts of carbon-intensive fertiliser input.”

In regions which do not support large-scale agricultural industries during winter months, the alternative to importing fresh foods from countries like Kenya is to turn to refrigerators or greenhouses to store food for months on end. But, insists Mr Shah, the carbon emissions emitted by these machines often outweigh those emitted by long haul travel.

Further damaging developing countries

“It makes sense to grow your products in the tropics because we don’t require heating. It naturally grows here,” he says. “This refrigerated stuff emits much more in terms of global warming and fluorocarbons and other gases. It’s much, much worse.”

The food miles agenda, adds Mr Shah, belies the fact that many of the planes used to transport produce are not specially chartered - they are already carrying passengers. “The flights are going to fly anyway because tourists are going to keep coming into Africa on holiday,” he says.

“You have got major industries in Europe and the UK that bring everything from bank notes to machines – Mercedes, wine and whisky –which has to travel by air. We’ve got to fill the bellies of these planes up, otherwise they are going to fly home empty.”

But perhaps most worryingly, he asserts, the food miles agenda and “labelling and shaming” risks strangling agricultural production in developing countries like Kenya that are heavily reliant on exporting fresh foods.

Expanding the debate beyond food miles

It is a threat as perilous, he insists, at least in the short term, as the changes inflicted by climate change - “Big time”.

“Our horticulture sector employs between 250,000 to 300,000 smallholders, plus another 250,000 people on the farms. Each one has got an average minimum family of five. So you are talking about putting 2 to 3 million people out of jobs, who don’t have food, medical health care, education - nothing.”

For Mr Shah, the choice is clear. Rather than relying on carbon labelling schemes developed by supermarkets, the debate on food miles needs to be expanded to include not just transportation, but the “total carbon emissions of a product through the supply chain”.

The Commonwealth Secretariat report ‘Trade, Climate Change and Sustainable Development: Issues for Small States, Least Developed Countries and Vulnerable Economies’ will be published later this year.

Key Links:

• Country Profile: Kenya
• Environmentally Sustainable Development

Related News:

• Fresh Produce Exporters Association of Kenya