samantha krahenbuhl - the problems with food insecurity and climate change
DESCRIPTION
Samantha Krahenbuhl - We have all been told the advantages of buying local. It is supposed to decrease your carbon footprint when you buy and apple locally rather than a Chilean apple. After all, it wasn’t shipped nearly as far and it feels good to help out local farmers. However, a study looking at local VS organic had some interesting results. They found that if you are in England and purchased lamb shipped from New Zealand it actually has one quarter of the carbon footprint that locally raised British lamb does. How is that? It turns out that it is because the New Zealand lamb is raised on grass, while the British lamb is raised on fossil-fuel-fertilized grain. That has the biggest impact; really only 5 percent of the carbon footprint from the lamb is due to shipping. So, it seems that the buy local strategy that many climate change activists have clung to may not be entirely accurate. The situation is much more complicated and just encouraging people to buy local is not going to do enough, nor is it always the most environmentally friendly option, even when considering the shipping impact. Scientists and activists, when touting food insecurity, claim that a hotter planet will result in less food because it will be harder to grow crops. The problem with this message is that food production isn’t only a victim of climate change; it is also the cause of. The food production system puts about 10-12 percent of humans total carbon emissions into the air. Also, 30-40 percent of that food is wasted through an inefficient supply chain. So, the tactic that food is insecure from climate change and that we need to produce more will ultimately harm us. This is because big food producers like Monsanto and other large agribusinesses are producing more and more food that is filled with pesticides and fertilizers that are made from fossil fuels that are simply speeding the earths demise. Really, we need to be well educated about where our food comes from, what goes into it and stopping food production with fossil fuels, rather than singing about the dangers of food insecurity.TRANSCRIPT
