Food Miles

This is obviously a key issue for New Zealand food and beverage exporters. New Zealand is a long distance from high income markets in Europe and North America. 

In 2006, Caroline Saunders led a research project to investigate this issue, working in collaboration with Andrew Barber at Agrilink, assisted by Greg Taylor, who was a researcher in the Agribusiness and Economics Research Unit at Lincoln University. 

Her research recognised that New Zealand has greater production efficiency in many food commodities compared to the United Kingdom. This led to the following key observation:

Thus, it is the total amount of energy used to produce and deliver a product to the market and the greenhouse gas emissions associated with it (such as CO₂) which are important, not just the delivery cost captured by the ‘food miles’. The food miles argument takes no account of the energy use/CO2 emissions in the production phase and assumes that a given product is produced to the same level of energy efficiency everywhere it is produced, when there is strong evidence to show that this is an unjustified assumption.

The report provided evidence that New Zealand food exports to the United Kingdom were significantly less harmful to the environment that the same products sourced locally. This analysis was very influential. It was cited by a research briefing produced by the House of Commons Library in the UK, which concluded that the British Government encourages sustainability in food provision, but not specifically reduction in food miles.

In 2007, Caroline received the NZIER Economics Award for her research on food miles.

The original food miles research report can be read here [external link].