2 results
Local or global: A biophysical analysis of a regional food system
- Meidad Kissinger, Cornelia Sussmann, Caitlin Dorward, Kent Mullinix
-
- Journal:
- Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems / Volume 34 / Issue 6 / December 2019
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 12 February 2018, pp. 523-533
-
- Article
- Export citation
-
Growing concern regarding environmental, social, economic and food quality outcomes of the modern global industrial food system as well as the implications of climate change on food security and food system sustainability have fomented interest in, and action to advance localized food systems. Environmental stewardship is an oft-touted benefit of food system localization. However, few studies have comparatively examined actual environmental benefits of local versus global supply systems and most focus on only one aspect (e.g., GHG emissions). The study reported here comparatively analyzes land, water, carbon and ecological footprints of a localized food supply and contemporary global food supply for the South-West British Columbia (Canada), bioregion (SWBC). The footprint family approach utilized allows measuring overall biophysical loads for the studied region. We quantified regional rates of reliance on imported biophysical services; measured the performances of specific food products grown locally in comparison with their imported counterparts; and identified those commodities that have better and worse local biophysical performances. For the SWBC bioregion, only 35% of the food consumed in the region is locally produced. Supplying the region's food demands requires 2 million hectares of land and 3 billion m3 of water, generating approximately 2.8 million tons of CO2e, with an eco-footprint of 2.5 million gha. Examining a large number of commodities grown and consumed in the bioregion revealed that only some commodities grown locally have absolute or significant biophysical advantages, while the rest have very little to no local advantage. Our analysis challenges the notion that local food systems are necessarily more environmentally sustainable from a biophysical resource use perspective and therefore may not represent the most compelling argument(s) for food system localization. We call for better and more comprehensive comparative analysis of existing and desired food systems as a mean to advance sustainability.
A novel methodology to assess land-based food self-reliance in the Southwest British Columbia bioregion
- Caitlin Dorward, Sean Michael Smukler, Kent Mullinix
-
- Journal:
- Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems / Volume 32 / Issue 2 / April 2017
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 15 February 2016, pp. 112-130
-
- Article
- Export citation
-
There is a growing awareness that climate change, economic instability, resource limitations and population growth are impacting the capacity of the contemporary global food system to meet human nutrition needs. Although there is widespread recognition that food systems must evolve in the face of these issues, a polarized debate has emerged around the merit of global-versus-local approaches to this evolution. Local food system advocates argue that increasing food self-reliance will concomitantly benefit human health, the environment and local economies, while critics argue that only a globalized system will produce enough calories to efficiently and economically feed the world. This debate is strong in British Columbia (BC), Canada, where residents and food security experts have called for increased food self-reliance while the provincial government largely supports export-oriented agriculture. As elsewhere, however, in BC this debate takes place in absence of an understanding of capacity for food self-reliance. The few studies that have previously evaluated self-reliance in this region have been limited in their approach in a number of ways. In this study we use a novel methodology to assess current (2011) status of land-based food self-reliance for a diet satisfying nutritional recommendations and food preferences that accounts for seasonality of crop production and the source of livestock feed, and applied it to the Southwest BC bioregion (SWBC) as a case study. We found that agricultural land use in SWBC is dominated by hay, pasture and corn silage, followed by fruits and vegetables. Fruit and vegetable production comprise 87% of total food crop production in SWBC by weight, and a substantial amount is produced in quantities beyond SWBC need per crop type, representing an export focused commodity with limited contribution to food self-reliance. Results illustrate that SWBC is a major producer of livestock products, but these industries rely on feed grain imports. The production of feed grain could therefore be considered a major constraint on self-reliance; SWBC's total dietary self-reliance is 12% if discounting livestock feed imports or 40% if including them. Results demonstrate that a diet including foods that cannot be grown in the region or consumed fresh out of season, limits potential food self-reliance. Our methods reveal the value of factoring dietary recommendations and food consumption patterns into food self-reliance assessments and the necessity of accounting for the source of livestock feed to fully understand the self-reliance status of a region.