News from the New Party

Bananas

Mick Hume takes issue with the Soil Association regarding proposals to make it harder for produce from Africa to be labelled as organic, thereby reducing the amount of African fruit and vegetables imported to the UK:

The justification is that this will reduce "food miles", CO2 emissions and man-made global warming, and thus protect the developing world from the impact of climate change. The likely effect will be to put some of the most downtrodden farmers in the world out of work.

So how do we save Africa from a possible future disaster? Apparently, by creating a real disaster in the here and now: making poor Africans even poorer. That sounds like madness - or plain badness - to me.

Air-freighted produce makes up 1 per cent of total UK organic sales - and those remain a tiny niche in the grocery market. Only a mind as sharp as an organic Kenyan banana could seriously believe that this is a big factor in Britannia's "carbon footprint". Indeed, the whole notion of "food miles" is hard to swallow. Research suggests that growing food in the sunshine of Africa and flying them to Europe produces less carbon - not to mention more taste - than growing them under glass and artificial heat in Britain or the Netherlands. Greenhouse effect, anybody?

Some of us might even suspect that, under the fresh-looking label of environmental concern, the UK organic lobby is expressing soiled Little Englander prejudices about keeping out "foreign muck".

Indeed, protectionism is as likely to be a motivation in this matter as environmental protection,  The burgeoning Fair Trade movement has gained a firm foothold in British supermarkets - all bananas sold by both Sainsbury's and Waitrose are fair trade, for example. This means a real headache for conscientious consumers conflicted by a choice between supporting third world producers and reducing their own carbon footprint.  And while the Soil Association might be more worried about a pain in the wallet, the green movement in general has for some time now given the impression that it would rather Africa starve now than drown or fry at some indefinite point in the future.  This is worth remembering when the next spate of anti-globalisation demonstrations/riots comes around.  The kind of trade favoured by the supposedly radical greens and leftists is neither free nor fair, and fundamentally inhumane.