Homegrown dilemma

Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver is an avid advocate of buying local. Photo / Supplied

In a world where New Zealand bluenose seabass can be sent to China and back to be sold here, this is heaven. The assembled market goods look sumptuous.

Organic apple juice, slices of hand-made cheeses freshly cut from the block, miniature cucumbers and eggplant, eight varieties of peruperu (Maori potatoes), shiny red and orange capsicums, organic beef and garlic sausages, beef and vegetable rissoles, organic blueberries... but it's the freshness and intense flavours that make the ensuing Sunday family dinner so memorably delicious.

There's abundant goodness on other levels too. This is all local produce, grown and made nearby - so it's providing economic benefit to the farmers in the surrounding community. It's great also to taste before you buy, chat to the sellers about what they grow and make - to know where and who your food comes from.

Plus it's good for the planet - locally grown and locally made sustainable food emits much less green house gases and has a much smaller carbon footprint than say garlic shipped from China. Or, for that matter, tomatoes from Australia. And then there's the taste - you simply don't get food like this at the supermarket.

There is, however, a small problem. I've driven to the Clevedon Village Farmers' Market from Auckland's North Shore. It's taken an hour to get here and at the rate of something like 188 grams of carbon dioxide per kilometre, I've seriously blown out my food miles account. My carbon balance sheet is likely worsened too by the fact that I cooked the meal on a gas BBQ. But I really don't care.

I'm a "locavore" convert - although next week I will aim for a farmers' market a little closer to home.

I suppose I should be concerned that as a locavore - the Oxford American Dictionary's word of the year for 2007 - I'm part of a burgeoning worldwide movement that could, according to the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research (NZIER), result in a $430 million drop in New Zealand's GDP.

The worry is that if British celebrity chefs like Jamie Oliver and Gordon Ramsay keep banging on about buying local fresh produce, the message may actually get through. Likewise for United States movements such as the "100-Mile Diet" which exhort participants to think about "local eating for global change". If the trend really does catch on, New Zealand's exports and our economy could suffer.

I know I should be more loyal to my country's overseas trade, but when you've sampled food this good there is no going back. Just ask the estimated 100,000 people a week who visit the 42 markets throughout the country that belong to the Farmers' Market New Zealand Association.

"It's about the smell, the aroma, the tasting of the products and the interaction you get with real human beings," says Farmers' Market New Zealand chairperson Chris Fortune. "What we're doing is defining what New Zealand food is about."

Fortune says part of what's driving people to farmers' markets is the bland quality of produce found in supermarkets. "We know that peaches and plums are hard and have no flavour because they have been picked earlier and earlier so they can last when they travel - the supermarket's goal is to keep the product on the shelf as long as possible."

The distance food travels is important for locavores, their number one argument being the closer the food is to its source, the fresher, tastier and more nutritious it will be. "I want to know my broccoli is not from China and my fish is from New Zealand," says Fortune. But the globalisation of the food-supply chain means knowing such basic information is not as easy as it sounds.

New Zealand doesn't have a mandatory country of origin labelling scheme, so it pays to vigilantly read labels which will show, for example, that a lot of frozen broccoli here comes from China and that New Zealand fish - such as bluenose - is sent to China for processing and then instead of being sent on to the United States is sometimes sent back here to be sold. Be careful, too, with bacon - unless it has a "100 per cent New Zealand" label, it may have also originated in China.

New Zealand is far from alone in circuitous food travels. Norwegian cod is also shipped to China, turned into fillets and shipped back to Norwegian shops for sale. Lemons from Argentina outsell the local lemons of citrus rich Valencia in Spain. At least half of Europe's peas are grown and produced in Kenya. And Italian kiwifruit can be found in New Zealand supermarkets. Yes, they're making our national fruit over there and shipping it here.

Food travels in mysterious ways - so what? Until recently most arguments against these roundabout journeys focused on "food miles" - the assumption that the ecological impacts of transporting food, particularly on airplanes over great distances, were not good in terms of the amount of green house gases they caused. It stood to reason that because locally produced food does not travel very far to reach your table, it would burn less fossil fuel in the process and have less adverse impact on the environment.

While it seemed a good theory, when it was put to the test, food miles were bunk. A study of the carbon cost of the global wine trade for example found it is actually better for New Yorkers to drink wine from Bordeaux, which is shipped by sea, than wine from California, sent by truck.

Similarly, importing beans from Uganda or Kenya - where the farms are small, tractor use is limited, and the fertiliser is almost always manure - tends to be more efficient than growing beans in Europe, with its reliance on energy-dependent irrigation systems. Another study showed roses grown in Kenya and air-freighted to Britain actually had a smaller carbon footprint than roses from Holland which are usually grown in heated greenhouses.

New Zealand researchers, like Professor Caroline Saunders at Lincoln University also did sterling work debunking food miles arguments for our major exports. She found that lamb raised in New Zealand and shipped 11,000 miles (17,840 km) to England produced 688 kilograms of carbon-dioxide emissions per tonne, about a fourth the amount produced by British lamb. In part, that is because pastures in New Zealand need far less fertiliser than most grazing land in Britain.

The environmental burden imposed by importing apples from New Zealand to Britain can be lower than locally grown apples because we have more sunshine - meaning the yield of New Zealand apples far exceeds the yield of those grown in northern climates. It also helps that much of our electricity is generated by renewable sources, which don't emit large amounts of carbon dioxide.

In a later study, Saunders factored in the greenhouse gas emissions produced by the animals themselves - turning their methane and nitrous oxide emissions into carbon dioxide equivalents. Even then, she was able to show New Zealand's dairy industry is way more efficient than Britain's which has 34 per cent more emissions per kilogram of milk solids and 30 per cent more per hectare than New Zealand including the shipping to Britain.

But while debate about food miles may have moved on, the trend towards buying local continues. A British example of the phenomenon is "Local to London" - part of a three-year project funded by New Covent Garden Market and the South East Food Group Partnership aiming to promote more regional and local food into London's eateries, homes and the public sector.

"The drivers of those campaigns are changing. Initially they were about food miles and environmental issues," says John Ballingall of NZIER. "Now people are saying 'buy local' so that you can support your local farmer during this time of economic downturn and ensure that the rural community that you live in is maintained."

Accepting that the trend is occurring, Ballingall and others have modelled what might be the economic consequences should it really catch on. Using an elegant "iceberg" model - an assumption that a proportion of exported agro-food commodities exported "melts" during transportation - Ballingall applied a theoretical 20 per cent "food miles shock" to some of our major food exports to Britain, Germany and France. The results are surprising.

"If food miles and buy local campaigns start to alter consumer behaviour New Zealand's GDP could be $430 million lower than it would have been otherwise," says Ballingall.

What exactly does that mean? That there would be significant drops in exports to Britain, France and Germany. "It doesn't mean we lose those exports because we are still producing the stuff, it's just we end up selling to other markets where perhaps we don't get quite as good a price."

Ballingall stresses that there's no need to panic just yet - the research is a theoretical glimpse forward on what may happen. "It just emphasises that our firms have to be ready for this," he says, pointing out that many other factors come into play in consumer choices about food.

"All the research I've seen still shows that what matters most is price. Price is miles ahead of anything else (pun intended). After that comes freshness and quality and safety and a bit further down the list are environmental issues."

Is our Government worried about the buy local trend?

"There is no definitive research on if, or to what extent, international customers may embrace this trend, nor is there definitive research on what cost such a trend may have on New Zealand," says Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade spokesman Dave Courtney.

"What is known is this may have a potential cost to New Zealand which is why Government and industry are working together to understand the environmental impact of food production, and how to produce high quality products while reducing environmental impacts."

Much of the effort is going into the "New Zealand Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Footprinting Strategy for the Land-Based Primary Sectors" - a collaboration of industry groups, government departments and crown research institute scientists.

"The aim is to get industry, science and Government working together to develop something that is scientifically rigorous and which will contribute to the development of robust and fair international standards for carbon footprinting," says Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry policy analyst Alison Watson.

Unlike the work at Lincoln University, the group isn't doing comparative studies, focusing instead on how to measure, and get international agreement, on the carbon footprints of New Zealand produce.

The first footprints showing "cradle to the grave" carbon dioxide emissions for dairy, kiwifruit and wine products made here, and shipped and consumed in markets around the world, is due in a couple of months.

"It's not an easy task to carbon footprint a product across its whole life-cycle," says Watson.

How, for example, do you allocate your on-farm emissions to just one product - like a leg of NZ lamb sold in a UK supermarket?"

Meanwhile, the British Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is about to release an update on its 2005 Food Miles report. Using new data on transport emissions, the report is expected to show our greenhouse gases for dairy and meat produce shipped to Britain stand up well compared to local equivalents.

The new data may mean, however, that some New Zealand horticulture products do not stack up so well against homegrown British produce.

But though considerable work is going into more detailed carbon footprinting schemes, one can't help wondering whether governments are missing the main point of buy local campaigns - namely freshness and taste. There's also a delicious paradox.

While the message to the world is to buy our low carbon exports, the message at home is buy local. Starting this month, Farmers' Market New Zealand begins a nationwide generic "honest-to-goodness goodness" newspaper advertising campaign - funded to the tune of $96,000 by the Government's Buy Kiwi Made Campaign.

It's not the first time the association has received Government money. As Fortune points out, in its start-up phase about four years ago New Zealand Trade and Industry provided some seed funding. "They believe farmers' markets are the incubators for small business," says Fortune.

Meanwhile, at the Clevedon Village Farmers' Market, there's another locavore in the making. Handing over cash for a fine, tender looking cut of Clevedon Valley organically grown rump steak, the first-time buyer seems very satisfied: "Why didn't I know about this market before? It's bloody brilliant. I'll be here every week."