Pigs do Fly (and cows, carrots and milk)

Archived

Wednesday, 05 June 2002

The following facts were taken from an article by Colin Clines, Dr Caroline Lucas and Vandana Shiva in The Ecologist, 5 June 2002. The authors are calling for a return to a more localised agricultural model.

For every calorie of carrot flown into the UK from S Africa, we use 66 calories of fuel.
For every 100 fruits consumed in the UK, only five will now have been produced domestically.
One shopping basket of organic products could have travelled 241,000 kilometres and released as much CO2 into the atmosphere as an average four-bedroom house does cooking meals over eight months.
In 1998 the UK imported 61,400 tonnes of poultry meat from the Netherlands, In the same year it exported 33,100 tonnes of poultry meat back to the Netherlands.
In 1997 126 million litres of milk were imported into the UK, while 270 million litres were exported at the same time.
In 1999 the EU imported 44,000 tonnes of live bovines from Argentina, 11,000 from Botswana, 40,000 from Poland and over 70,000 from Brazil. In the same year the EU exported 874,211 tonnes of live bovines to the rest of the world.

This makes it very clear that when buying organic it is good to try to also buy British, where possible. If your local supermarket doesn’t stock some home-produced products then let the management know you would prefer them.