Today’s Guardian has an interesting article from ActionAid on the tensions between environmental and developmental concerns over flown-in produce:
In Africa alone more than one million people depend on selling fruit and vegetables to British shoppers. Fruit and vegetables are mostly airfreighted, but cutting African farmers off from international trade will cause devastation which far outweighs the tiny reduction in the UK’s carbon emissions — around 0.1% of our total emissions — that might result. In this case, the ethical choice would be to buy air-freighted products.
Obviously with perishable goods the greener option of sea freight is impossible without freezing products (which has its own consumer and environmental issues).
This question is also being looked at by the Beeline project, one of many fascinating teams here at the Doors 9 conference in Delhi that we are attending. More on that soon!