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Eco-label will create green standard for food, says Miliband
By
Charles Clover, Environment Editor
An eco-label for food that shows the amount of
greenhouse gases involved in growing and transporting it is being considered by the
Government, David Miliband, the Environment Secretary, will announce today.
The
idea is to standardise green labelling schemes which have been promised so far by Tesco, Asda
and Marks and Spencer, and give the consumer the confidence to choose food which is genuinely
environmentally friendly, Mr Miliband will tell the National Farmers' Union's conference in
Birmingham.
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The new eco-label will be distinct from the two
existing labelling schemes for nutritional information, such as a food's fat, sugar and salt
content.
Mr Miliband will warn that establishing the label "is not an easy piece of
work," and will take time, "particularly if it is to include the whole lifecycle of food
from production to distribution."
He will go on to say: "In the shorter term we want
to develop environmental standards specifically for food production.
''This could
cover a range of factors including energy inputs, fertiliser use, soil management, waste
management and water pollution.
''I want the Department for the Environment, Food and
Rural Affairs to work on an open basis with producers and retailers on whether we can agree on
a green standard that allows customers to know something about the provenance of what they are
buying and farmers to get recognition in the marketplace."
Developing an eco-label
will almost inevitably re-ignite arguments between organic and conventional farmers which
flared up last week.
A study carried out for the Government by Manchester Business
School said milk, tomatoes and chicken produced by organic methods were less environmentally
friendly than the same products produced by conventional means because they used more fossil
fuels.
The Soil Association, the leading organic farming body, claimed that the
Manchester Business School study made mistakes and did not include the biodiversity impacts of
different farming methods.
He says top of the range retailers such as Marks and Spencer
are paying higher prices for milk "but I have yet to see their practices become
mainstream."
•Helen Philips, the chief executive of Natural England, is expected to
announce that farmers will no longer have to carry out an audit of "every buttercup in
England" to find out if they qualify for the best-remunerated green farming
scheme.
Organic methods have been shown to produce more food for declining farmland
birds, such as the grey partridge and skylark.
There are also likely to be arguments
about whether local food, produced under glass out of season is better than food produced
without using fossil fuels in Spain or Africa – but flown into Britain.
Mr Miliband is
expected to say the reason an eco-label is needed is that Britain is living as though it had
three planets' worth of natural resources.
''We need to move to an economy that
lives within environmental limits – to a one-planet economy and one planet
farming."
Farming, he will say, produces seven per cent of the country's greenhouse
gas emissions, notably nitrous oxide and methane.
The food and drink sector as a whole
is estimated to be responsible for more than 30 per cent of Europe's greenhouse
gases.
Meanwhile, Peter Kendall, the NFU president, is expected to ask whether
supermarkets actually mean it when they fall over each other to paint themselves as the
greenest or most responsible.
From April 1, rather than prospective applicants wasting
time and money on ''environmental plans" Natural England will consult with farmers in an
attempt to screen out applications that are likely to be unsuccessful.
 Print | 24-03-2007, 19:57:00
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