A miserable wet summer and another piece of fashion greenery is washed down the drain. Hovis, a venerable British brand which has for generations epitomised the sliced and packaged brown loaf, has abandoned its commitment to buy only British wheat.
The U.K.'s wheat yield is down 14 per cent after the deluge that made 2012 the second wettest year on record. Premier Foods, which owns Hovis, has bowed to the inevitable and will source a third of its grain from Canada and continental Europe. The company will shed the British boast from its packaging which was introduced ahead of the Olympics as a patriotic gesture in support of British farmers. Hovis is not alone in struggling with the cost of flying the Union Jack. Morrisons, a leading U.K. grocer which previously made a virtue of owning its own abattoirs and sourcing only British meat, has begun to buy overseas, in search of cheaper cuts to satisfy its cash-strapped customers.
The nonsense notion of food miles – the whimsy that says we should all live off local produce and end the wasteful and carbon-costly practice of sourcing food thousands of miles from our plates – is finally being laid to rest. The inconvenient truth is that the Canadian prairies are a more efficient place to grow grain than soggy Lincolnshire.
Moreover, there is nothing wrong with flying in lettuce from Southern Africa during the northern hemisphere's winter. The trade in fresh food creates badly-needed employment in countries such as Zambia and Angola and the fuel emitted by a jumbo jet is probably no worse than that consumed in heating polytunnels to create a false growing season or for that matter the energy expended in chilling summer fruit to ensure that it will last unspoiled through the winter. In a comparative study conducted by Adrian Williams at Cranfield University, he revealed that the carbon footprint of cut flowers sourced from Dutch greenhouses was 16 times greater than Kenyan flowers airfreighted to Britain from Africa.
There is nothing intrinsically good about a local business. If it can only be sustained by sentiment and subsidy in the form of government preference or tariffs, then it is a bad business and will probably not survive. The U.K.'s National Farmer's Union is unhappy about the lack of commitment from grocers to local sourcing. But if you produce a tradable commodity, you must live with competing traders and exploit your comparative advantage. That is the real definition of "fair trade."
Carl Mortished