Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
livestock farmers in local economies don't need fossil fuels in any quantity, a difference
that is clearly reflected in the FAO figures.
Take for example the figure for transport given in the FAO's table: less than one million
tonnes of CO
2
eq - an amount so low that it doesn't even figure in the column headed
'percentage of animal food GHGs emissions'. Whilst it is entirely believable that Maasai
herdsmen or backyard poultry keepers in South East Asia use negligible amounts of fossil
fuel for transporting their goods, the figure seems absurdly low for a global industry which
mainly serves the industrialized countries; and it is completely at variance with other es-
timates. For example, the UK's Cabinet Office reckons that transport for the UK food in-
a quarter of UK food is meat or dairy, that means that in the UK alone we emit nearly five
times as much carbon transporting livestock products as the FAO considers the entire world
does.
How does the FAO arrive at this glaring underestimate? They explain that they calcu-
lated the emissions generated by a few major international shipping routes involved in meat
and feed commerce:
These flows represent some 60 per cent of international meat trade. Annually they
produce some 500,000 tonnes of CO
2
. This represents more than 60 per cent of total
CO
2
emissions induced by meat-related sea transport, because the trade flow selection
is biased towards the long distance exchange. On the other hand, surface transport to
and from the harbour has not been considered. Assuming for simplicity, that the latter
two effects compensate each other, the total annual meat transport-induced CO
2
emis-
In other words, 'for simplicity', the FAO has omitted to take into account all surface
transport and airfreight anywhere in the world - all the cattle trucks and milk tankers, the
lorries loaded with hay and straw, the vets' visits to farms and the relief milkers' trips to
work, the deliveries of feed and fertilizer, the Spanish artics and the Tesco vans, the just-
in-time deliveries of McDonalds burgers and M & S chilled beef vindaloo - all of this is
discounted in order to cancel out a modest overestimate made in its calculation about in-
ternational shipping. Sea transport represents a minor part of food transport emissions. The
UK imports around 40 per cent of its food, but international shipping represents just 13.5
per cent of transport emissions, whereas road transport constitutes 73 per cent and aviation
13.5 per cent.
63
It is hard to pin down what other assumptions the FAO may have made to 'simplify'
their calculations. For example their breakdown makes no mention of refrigeration, other
than in connection with shipping by sea, so we have no way of knowing to what extent
