SUSTAINABILITY Why live exports cost the earth

Pig in a poke


Food Matters
Chris Brown

Just recently my friend’s sister travelled home to Ireland for Christmas and, having had trouble with delays at the airport the previous two years, decided to take the ferry from Cherbourg to Rosslare instead. As she parked up on the car deck of the boat she noticed that either side of her car were two huge lorries. The cargo inside both of these freight vehicles was live animals – pigs on their way to Ireland to be slaughtered.
These animals would have been grown in cruel indoor confinement in the vast pig sheds of mainland Europe, have never known daylight, nor had anywhere near enough space to move around and be a pig in. They were now on a final journey, crammed into a lorry down in the bowels of a ship facing a winter sea passage, then onwards along the new fast, and fuel thirsty, road network, to a slaughter line. A sorry tale. We shouldn’t treat animals in this way.
But why were these pigs making this journey?
It could be that the bacon and pork, although reared abroad could be ‘passed off’ as Irish because it’s killed here in Ireland (dishonest in my view), or it could, incredibly, be destined for a further journey to another country to be served up. According to a report on RTÉ’s Six One News, pork exports from Ireland to China, on the other side of the world, are now worth €200 million. And with talk of ‘sustainable growth’ the Taoiseach if off to China to see about selling some more food to a country that has a population of 1,300 billion to feed.
China, meanwhile, has been rapidly bulldozing prime food-producing land to build thousands of factories to manufacture cheap goods for worldwide consumption.
Should alarm bells not be ringing? Are we burning up too much fuel to feed people?

Carbon imbalance
Pig meat produced in Europe and sent to China obviously has a huge carbon footprint. And pig meat consumed in the homes hotels and canteens of the West of Ireland, for instance, obviously should be produced in home counties – yet An Bord Bia (Irish Food Agency) has an office in Shanghai but none in Maigheo!
Currently, international currency deals dictate the movement of food. Food has gone past being simply sustenance for us and our families. Nowadays, it is also a commodity to trade around the world in order to make money. If the price or the deal is better somewhere over yonder, vast tonnage of meat and other primary foods will travel by road, rail, sea and increasingly air, to bring in profits for the money men.
During the foot-and-mouth crisis of about ten years ago (in which, ironically, the disease spread faster and further because of moving live animals around on lorries) it was revealed that the UK was exporting 110 million tonnes of lamb and importing 115 million tonnes of lamb. It was pointed out that surely it would make sense just to import the 5 million tonnes difference to save all that energy being used. The logic fell on deaf ears, however.
It is hard to know what to do to halt the emissions we now collectively make, and food miles – the distance food has travelled – are hard to avoid when buying from supermarket chains that pedal food from every corner of the globe. However, we should insist on knowing where our food comes from. The best way to achieve this is by supporting local initiatives, such as Lamb Direct, a group of Maigheo farmers working hard to bring the finest meat to home tables. It would be a helpful start toward changing the course of the road we currently follow.

Chris Brown is a food producer in Louisburgh. He has a particular interest in food miles and buying local.