Putting pollution on grocery bills

ROME: Cod caught off Norway is shipped to China to be turned into filets, then shipped back to Norway for sale. Argentine lemons fill supermarket shelves on the Spanish Citrus Coast as local lemons rot on the ground. Half of the peas in Europe are grown and packaged in Kenya.

In the United States, FreshDirect.com proclaims kiwi season has expanded to "All year!" now that Italy has become the world's leading supplier of the national fruit of New Zealand, taking over in the Southern Hemisphere's winter.

Food has moved around the world since Europeans discovered tea in China, but never at the speed or in the amounts it has over the last few years. Consumers in not only the richest nations but also, increasingly, the developing world expect food whenever they crave it, with no concession to season or geography.

Increasingly efficient global transport networks make it practical to bring food before it spoils from distant places where labor costs are lower. And the penetration of megamarkets in nations from China to Mexico with supply and distribution chains that gird the globe - like Wal-Mart, Carrefour and Tesco - has accelerated the trend.

But the movable feast comes at a cost: pollution, especially carbon dioxide, from transporting the food.

Under longstanding trade agreements, fuel for international freight carried by sea and air is not taxed. Now, many economists, environmentalists and politicians say it is time to make shippers and shoppers pay for the pollution, through taxes or other measures.

"We're shifting goods around the world in a way that looks really bizarre," said Paul Watkiss, an Oxford University economist who wrote a recent European Union report on food imports. He noted that Britain, for example, imports - and exports - 15,000 tons of waffles, and similarly exchanges 20 tons of bottled water with Australia.

More important, Watkiss said, "we are not paying the environmental cost of all that travel."

Europe is poised to change that. The European Commission announced this year that all freight-carrying flights into and out of Europe would be included in the European emissions trading program by 2012, meaning that permits will have to be purchased for the pollution they generate.

The commission, the EU's executive arm, is negotiating with the global shipping organization, the International Maritime Organization, over a tax or other plan to reduce greenhouse gases. If there is no solution by yearend, sea freight will eventually be included in the emissions trading program, too, said Barbara Helferrich, spokesman for the European Commission Environment Directorate.

"We're really ready to have everyone reduce - or pay in some way," she said.

The European Union, the world's leading food importer, has increased imports 20 percent in the last five years. The value of fresh fruit and vegetables imported by the United States, in second place, nearly doubled between 2000 and 2006.

Under a little known international treaty called the Convention on International Civil Aviation, signed in Chicago in 1944 to help the fledgling airline industry, fuel for international travel and transport of goods, including food, is exempt from taxes levied on fuel for trucks, cars and buses. There is also no tax on fuel used by ocean freighters.

Proponents say ending these breaks could help ensure that producers and consumers pay the environmental cost of increasingly well-traveled food.

The food and transport industries say the issue is more complicated. The debate has put some companies on the defensive, including Tesco, the largest British supermarket chain, known as a vocal promoter of green initiatives.

Some of those companies say that they are working to limit greenhouse gases produced by their businesses but that the question is how to do it. They oppose regulation and new taxes and, partly in an effort to head them off, are advocating consumer education instead. Tesco, for instance, is introducing a labeling system that will let consumers assess a product's carbon footprint.

"This may be as radical for environmental consuming as putting a calorie count on the side of packages to help people who want to lose weight," said Trevor Datson, a spokesman for Tesco.

Some foods that travel long distances may actually have an environmental advantage over local products, like flowers grown in the tropics instead of in energy-hungry northern greenhouses.

Better transportation networks have sharply reduced the time required to ship food abroad. For instance, better roads in Africa have helped cut the time it takes for goods to go from farms on that continent to stores in Europe to 4 days from 10 in recent years.

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