PLATFORM:The food and grocery sectors will have to come to terms with managing emissions

BELCHING COWS have been keeping me up at night recently. It’s not the noise that does it, but the unsettling thought of all those burps are enough to make anybody in business toss and turn under the duvet.

The greenhouse gases emitted by belching cattle are perhaps the best illustration of the greatest problem – and the greatest opportunity – that anybody in the food industry will face in their lifetimes: the sustainability of our food supply.

Belching cattle are just part of the broader issue of sustainability in agriculture. Transport costs, pesticide use, government regulation and the changing patterns of wealth and population make for a potent mixture that restaurateurs, farmers and retailers will all have to grapple with in the near future.

How they handle it will be critical in determining their success or failure in business as both consumers and governments increasingly demand that the food industry promotes sustainable consumption.

The trends are clear: a growing world population needs more food. Current estimates predict that the world’s population will increase by as much as 30 per cent from 6.8 billion people today to almost 9 billion by 2050.

How can we create an agriculture that will produce more food without damaging the environment? As a grocer I believe that retailers and the food industry are a critical element in mediating between the demands of consumers and the needs of the environment.

In the current recession, our industry has focused on maintaining low prices for consumers. Regardless of how long this recession lasts, though, the need for grocers and the food business to focus on sustainably sourced food in addition to value will not go away.

In fact, changing demographics will only make the issue more pressing as we saw from food riots last summer in countries as divergent as Egypt, Madagascar and Indonesia.

The two main ways we can deal with this problem are by addressing how we produce food and how we distribute it.

How we produce our food is critical. The so-called “green revolution” of the 1950s and 1960s dramatically increased crop yields to accommodate a rising population and these efforts will have to be replicated and improved upon. Importantly, we must improve yields in a way that does not lead to large quantities of fertiliser run-off in rivers and lakes. The US, the EU and Japan have already set up government organic standards to certify organically produced crops.

On the business side, retailers and consumer product makers are seeing a commercial benefit to promoting organic food, as environmentally conscious consumers increasingly choose organic products.

For example, Unilever has sustainable agriculture guidelines for tea, sunflowers, tomatoes, peas, spinach and dairy products, while Marks and Spencer has adopted “field-to-fork” standards that cover environmental and labour standards in the production of the food it sells.

The food business is likely to see greater pressure from consumers and regulators to increase its use of organic agriculture. In addition to a growing demand for organic food, the industry is likely to see a corresponding decline in the consumption of certain other products, particularly meat.

Although I have a soft spot for Daisy the cow, she and her friends each burps about 100kg of methane or more every year.

Livestock accounts for 18 per cent of total greenhouse gas emissions – mostly due to belching, although some also comes out the other end.

Worldwide beef and milk production is expected to double in the next 30 years, helped by strong growth in the developing world which, as it gets wealthier, will also seek to increase its consumption of meat.

More people eating more beef means more greenhouse gas burps from more cows. The emissions from cows are especially noxious because methane has about 20 times the heat-trapping ability in the atmosphere as cattle.

The world can ill afford a doubling of the size of our cattle herds and a combination of price and environmental regulations will limit future growth. The food business must prepare for greater regulatory pressure to reduce beef and lamb consumption for this reason, possibly by higher taxes on these products.

The food industry is also likely to see a shift to increased consumption of protein-rich foods that use less land such as pulses, as well as some displacement of meat demand toward lower emission protein such as chicken or pork. In addition to some cutting back on meat, we can also manage our existing livestock more cleverly.

For example, most of the US herd is fed on corn or soy, which certainly makes for a tender steak. However, the diet also creates more methane than cows fed on grass or flax.

A pilot programme in France is experimenting with such a diet and early indications are that it is yielding a 30 per cent reduction in methane.If the food we produce will be more sustainable, so too will the way we distribute it.

Environmentalists have drawn attention to the way consumers in the developed world often avoid local seasonal products for imported fruit and vegetables.

In January, the tables of northern Europe are filled with South African strawberries, Chilean grapes and Kenyan runner beans. It clearly requires a lot of fuel to fly these products to our stores. Grocers and the food business will need to adapt by offering increased local seasonal produce to their customers.

We must be on our guard, however, against automatically assuming that products from abroad have a necessarily higher carbon footprint. Efficiently transported goods from abroad can create fewer emissions than locally sourced but inefficiently transported goods.

In this regard, the distribution centres of supermarkets are an environmental boon and the efficiencies they create must be increased, not scaled back. By sending limited numbers of fully stocked lorries from distribution centres to stores, they cut back the fuel that would be used by a single food producer chugging from supermarket to supermarket and dropping off a few kilos of food at each one.

More organic produce, more local food, less beef and greater efficiency in distribution are the key factors that will increasingly shape the food industry of the future. If the food industry can rise to meet the challenge I will be delighted. Then the only thing to disturb my sleep will be the memory of scary movies and the occasional over-indulgence in late-night coffee.

Feargal Quinn is an Independent member of the Seanad.