Tuesday, December 08, 2009 by Kathy Means
Fresh produce: Good for you, good for the earth
Assessing any product’s impact on the earth can be a challenge. There are many calculators and many different ways of looking at impact (carbon footprint, lifecycle assessments, etc.). Yet it’s important to make the effort. That’s one of the reasons PMA supports the Stewardship Index for Specialty Crops, a multi-stakeholder initiative to develop a system for measuring sustainable performance throughout the specialty crop supply chain, including fresh produce. The project seeks to offer a suite of outcomes-based metrics to enable operators at any point along the supply chain to benchmark, compare, and communicate their own performance.
And from our friends at Freshfel Europe, the forum for the European fresh fruits and vegetables chain, we received a summary on climate change that shows fresh produce items step softly on our earth. They also have a fact sheet on the topic.
The report summarized a climate smart food conference in Lund, Sweden, Nov. 23-24 where participants discussed the climate impact of the entire food chain, with a view on production, trade, waste and consumer awareness. “As global food production from farm to fork is currently estimated to account for 25 to 30 percent of total consumption related greenhouse gas emissions, there is indeed a need to reduce this figure,” according to the summary. “In this respect the F&V sector representative highlighted in his presentation the fact that the consumption of fruit and vegetables is an essential part of a ‘climate smart’ diet. On average most fruit and vegetables outperform other food products when it comes to their carbon footprint.”
Intuitively, we can imagine that products that come from the earth and move to the consumer as food with little processing would be one of the gentler food items in terms of sustainability. But it’s nice to have the numbers to back that up as well.