ANIMAL FURLONGS AND VEGETABLE MILES - MEAT: A Benign Extravagance - page 185

case may be. This is what 'total localization' involves and Weber and Matthews, perhaps
because they live in food deficit areas themselves, haven't grasped this.
That is not to say that total localization is either desirable or achievable. Grain has to
be traded to some extent to alleviate crop failures; and the environmental cost of shipping
non-perishable goods to regions where they cannot be grown is slight. There are those who
argue that Kenyans should be lifted out of poverty through the otherwise fatuous business
of flying fresh flowers and out of season vegetables to Europe. 49 On the other hand, truck-
ing goods across continents to regions where they can be grown satisfactorily causes en-
vironmental damage and results in unsustainable concentrations of biomass and nutrients
where they are not needed, for the sake of an economic advantage which is pocketed by su-
permarkets, not by farmers. As for countries like New Zealand that have a surplus of land
and food, perhaps they should open their doors to immigrants and parcel out some of their
farms to landless peasants. If we are going to globalize everything else, we should global-
ize land reform as well.
At the end of their paper, Weber and Matthews point out that GHG emissions are 'only
one dimension of the environmental impacts of food production'. Food miles may not be
over-extravagant in their energy use, but they are thickly implicated in a centralized distri-
bution system which multiplies our energy expenditure at every opportunity and whose im-
pacts include excessive packaging and refrigeration, waste, traffic congestion, road-build-
ing, noise, accidents, loss of local distinctiveness, exploitation and displacement of peas-
ants, excessive immigration, urban slums, deforestation and habitat destruction, removal of
biomass from third world countries, the undermining of local communities in the UK, the
collapse of UK farming and the blood which is spilt over oil fields. It is idle to imagine that
we can create local food systems in isolation from this globalized economy. To reinvent a
truly local food economy we will have to make the whole system more decentralized, and
relocalize the delivery not just of food, but of a panoply of goods such as energy, fibre,
building materials, waste disposal and water.
1 The Khadigar Community (n.d.), 'Ethical Farming in Action', Vohan News International , 1.
2 Vitousek, Peter et al (1986), 'Human Appropriation of the Products of Photosynthesis', BioScience , 36(6) 368-73.
3 Cited in Betty, Joe (2007), 'The Floated Watermeadows of Wessex: A Triumph of English Agriculture', in Cook,
Hadrian and Williamson, Tom, Watermeadows: History, Ecology and Conservation , Windgather Press.
4 Defoe, Daniel (1727), A Tour Through England and Wales , Everyman, 1928, p 283.
5 Anybody who has ever tried to wash dried dung off the flanks of a cow will understand why it was valued for its
adhesive properties.
6 Polyface Inc, (n.d.), Product Descriptions , http://www.polyfacefarms.com/products.aspx
7 Komilis, Dimitris P and Ham, Robert K (2004), 'Life Cycle Inventory of Municipal Solid Waste and Yard Waste
Windrow Composting in the United States', Journal of Environmental Engineering , November 2004.