This study was undertaken by Cranfield University, AEA and others for Defra, and it looks at the supply chains of seven food commodity groups, comparing UK-based with imported production across a range of environmental impacts areas, including GHG emissions.
Summary as follows:
Food production and consumption has a large environmental impact. The increased global trade in food is leading to a greater diversity of food chains supplying the UK consumer. The move towards year-round supply is also leading to greater production in the UK out-of-season.
This raises questions regarding the comparative life-cycle burdens of different food supply chains across the year and the extent to which some types of chains might be exporting our environmental burdens to countries outside the UK (through imports) or leading to additional UK burdens (through domestic out-of-season production).
The overall objective of this project was to produce a comparative life-cycle inventory (LCI) of the environmental burdens and resource use arising from the production of seven key food commodities for which the UK-based and imported production and supply chains are significantly different: apples and lamb (UK and New Zealand); beef and poultry (UK and Brazil); potatoes (UK and Israel), strawberries and tomatoes (UK and Spain).
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