Oliver Griffiths

The Pineapple Strike

Happy New Year. I hope that anyone lucky enough to be in Italy over the holiday period was not badly affected by the Pineapple Strike. In case you missed it, the Italian Agriculture Minister Luca Zaia announced the Strike at a news conference on 16 December. In place of pineapples he encouraged Italians to purchase fruits produced in Italy, together with the traditional Italian Christmas products of zampone (pig's trotter stuffed with pork meat) and cotechino (pork sausage). I have an Italian friend who loves Hawaiian pizza. I couldn't help thinking of the mental anguish that the Strike would cause this Italian patriot and pineapple lover.

Having done my first blog post on the subject of consumer patriotism, it feels nostalgic to return to the same topic to kick off 2009. Minister Zaia's laid out three reasons for seasonal Italian consumer patriotism. First, pineapples are a 'symbol of everything that is not Italian'. Second, foreign producers of pineapples may use carcinogenic insecticides. Third, he was concerned about the environmental impact of shipping pineapples over long distances.

From a consumer's point of view, trade is at heart about introducing variety. In essence it is all about buying symbols of other countries. I like to buy seasonal fruits and I am a sucker for farmers' markers - but a holiday period consuming only British fruit would be a drab affair. From my point of view, being able to buy a ripe pineapple at any time of the year is one of the luxuries that quick transport and international trade offers. And it is often developing countries that are in the best position to provide these out-of-season luxuries. Italian pineapple imports were worth Î73 million in 2007. Two of the biggest exporters of pineapples are Cote D'Ivoire and The Philippines. So long as the producers there are producing safe products, I don't think that we should be discouraging consumption of their pineapples.

Plus these luxuries needn't be viewed as guilty pleasures, even taking into account the fact that they are often transported over large distances. Calculating the carbon footprint of a product is far more complicated than simply looking at the 'food miles' that a product has travelled. A study by Lincoln University looked at the carbon footprint of producing and transporting New Zealand lamb versus Welsh lamb. I don't agree with all the findings of the study - but it illustrates that how far a product has been transported often has much less impact on its overall carbon footprint than how it was produced. In fact, whether you drove or walked to the store to buy your pineapple may turn out to be a bigger factor in its overall carbon footprint than how far it travelled to the store.

Posted at 15:19 05 January 2009 by Oliver Griffiths  |  Comments[0]

Carbon of Origin

Peter Mandelson made a short speech on trade and climate change in Oslo recently that is well worth a read. A couple of things sprang to mind for me.

In the first paragraph of the speech there's an (unconscious?) echo of one of Adam Smith's best quotes. Mandelson said: "A tomato grown and shipped to Europe from Senegal produces less carbon than a tomato grown in an artificially-heated greenhouse in Europe". Compare that to Smith in the Wealth of Nations: "By means of glasses, hotbeds and hotwalls, very good grapes can be raised in Scotland, and very good wine too can be made of them at about 30 times the expense for which at least equally good can be brought from foreign countries. Would it be a reasonable law to prohibit the importation of all foreign wines, merely to encourage the making of Claret and Burgundy in Scotland?" In defence of the carbon footprint of 18th century Scottish glasshouses, they were probably only solar powered.

It must be the case that a positive trade policy, based on liberalising markets for low carbon technologies, can help in addressing climate change. A negative trade policy designed to punish international free riders is more problematic. There is rightly a lot of interest in the idea of border adjustment measures, not least because the US Congress currently seems so set on the idea. Setting aside the issue of how compatible border adjustments would be with WTO rules (see a debate here if you're interested), any adjustment mechanism would be very difficult - and consequently costly - to operate. In practical terms, with the globalisation of supply chains and individual products now containing parts sourced from many countries, such measures would be a nightmare to implement. They are also likely to produce incentives to game the system. If you thought preferential rules of origin were complex, just you wait until carbon of origin. 

It also feels like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. It may be axiomatic for some people that US cap and trade legislation without border protection would lead to whole swathes of US industry being wiped out by (especially Chinese) competition. But this hasn't been the experience in the EU under the Emissions Trading Scheme. And the evidence is that cap and trade legislation would have a strictly limited impact in the US too. That's not to belittle the impact on a couple of sectors - but there must be better ways to deal with the problem than overarching border defence. Some free permits perhaps?

My personal nightmare is that if we fail to complete the Doha Round in the near future, one tricky multilateral negotiation cross-fertilises with another tricky multilateral negotiation in the shape of the post-2012 climate change framework. That way madness lies.

Posted at 09:06 09 October 2008 by Oliver Griffiths  |  Comments[3]