In all seriousness, you ask good questions and make a point worth arguing about. You also make me wonder whether EU farmers could make themselves greener and remain competitive, and how American farmers, on the rocky coast or in the fertile heartland, compare.

And you reinforce my admiration for New Zealand’s international, ecological and environmental long-sightedness. Friends who recently visited told me that New Zealand farmers receive nearly no subsidies and have therefore had to reinvent their farming practices regularly in order to stay competitive.

They appreciate the difficulty of the question too. The first discussion of the benefits of eating locally I ever read came from a British woman who had learned the theory — on a New Zealand farm.

Buying Kenyan roses good for the environment

Moves by some British consumers to boycott Kenyan fresh produce has more to do with protectionism than with a genuine concern for the environment.

The concept that this latest hysteria is based on — the food mile — is an unscientific measure of pollution, given respectability by the British government. It looks at the number of miles a product has travelled from the farm to the UK, the further, the “worse”.

The British government is solidly behind this philosopher-stone concept and is even planning a special food miles tax, according to some newspaper reports.

THERE ARE THREE DIMENSIONS to this new crisis facing our country. First, is the science, or lack of it. Planes, such as the ones we use to fly fresh produce to Europe, pollute the environment. So do the trucks they use to move flowers from the Netherlands to the UK, or something else from Hungary.

But you can’t apportion pollution blame to a product based on its mode of transportation only. You will need to examine how it is produced, processed, packaged, stored and so on.

European agriculture heats its green houses. The energy used to heat these green houses is generated, in some cases, from the burning of fossil fuels. Secondly, relatively more artificial fertilisers are put in the soil in Europe, than in Africa for example, where we are more likely to use organic manure.

Chances are that European products are uncompetitive not just in price, but also in the energy consumed (and therefore pollution generated) in their production. If British shoppers want to eat green, the science will most likely direct them to Kenyan fresh produce.

The second dimension, and related to the foregoing, is what a British leader referred to as “food patriotism”. British agriculture has been on the decline, with negative consequences for rural economies. There has been a campaign in the UK for consumers to buy local food to support local jobs. In that sense, the food miles campaign is akin to the agricultural subsidies paid to European and other rich world farmers.

Its purpose is to keep uncompetitive producers in business for domestic, political, economic and other reasons.

The European Union, Japan and the United States of America play this kind of game all the time. The only industry where Africa has a chance to compete in the world market is agriculture. By using every trick to keep Africa out of their markets, these countries are sealing the continent’s coffin.

The final dimension has to do with the loaded dice that is the international economy. For poor countries, it never rains; it pours. The rich countries became so by trading; they have become richer because of a system that removes barriers to trade, therefore enabling them to sell more to the world.

INTERESTINGLY, EVEN AS THEY have preached to the rest of the world to open their markets, rich countries have not seen the need to do the same to their own markets. When they do not spend money to distort markets, they have an arsenal of sophisticated mechanisms — consumer agitation must rank among them — which keep their markets secure from the bulk of the exports from poor countries.

They are in the happy circumstances of being able to sell to the world but not necessarily to buy from it in the same proportion. This — rather than any special ability — is what in large measure accounts for the widening wealth gap between the rich and the poor.

The rich world uses copious amounts of English these days explaining and trying to justify the unsustainable injustice of the international economic and political order.

LOCALLY, THE HORTICULTURAL export sector is one of the few truly successful segments of the Kenyan economy. Its destruction by this food miles campaign would do unspeakable damage to the nation. The loss of income in already impoverished rural neighbourhoods would be an unimaginable setback. Sadly, the UK is the dominant market for flowers and horticultural produce and the industry may pay a very high price for putting all its faith in the British.

All human beings have a stake in protecting the earth. It is the responsibility of the rich, as well as the poor, to take care of the environment to protect the survival of our species. Poor countries, however, have an additional responsibility: To generate the wealth they need to protect their independence and provide their people with an acceptable quality of life.

The rich countries, recently joined by China, are the world’s worst polluters. And they are not anxious to take steps to redress this because they fear damaging their own economies. Poor countries such as Kenya rank very low in the league of polluters. Yet they might have to suffer an inordinate amount of economic damage and shoulder a proportionately heavier burden in the environment business.

THE ENVIRONMENT, IN THIS sense, becomes yet another dimension of global inequality.

If the British consumer is interested in genuinely protecting the environment, then they should demand information on the carbon yield in the totality of producing and transporting a commodity. Once such data is available, producers can then be required to either save energy or take measures to remove carbon dioxide in quantities equal to the ones they emitted in producing and taking their products to the market.

That way, an increasing amount of products can be rendered carbon neutral. Agitating against Kenyan products will not make the food the British eat carbon neutral, it will not protect the environment, it will merely destroy the Kenyan economy.

If sense does not prevail and the food mile becomes the new basis for deciding what to consume, then Kenyan unions, farmers’ organisations and consumer groups would have every justification to mobilise local consumers to afford British products similar treatment.

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