Efforts by developing countries to maximise food production and generate job-creation by moving to expand their agro-processing sectors could come under closer official scrutiny following claims made in a recent study published by the United Nations Food & Agriculture Organization (UNFAO) that the pursuits of food processing, packaging, transport, household consumption and waste disposal “are pushing the food supply chain to the top of the greenhouse gas emitters list.”
The findings of the study presented at last November’s high-profile COP26 Climate Conference in Scotland is less than welcome news, particularly in poor countries where agro-processing is both a significant employer of labour as well as a key contributor to food security.
The FAO study asserts that the food supply chain in many countries is on course to overtake farming and land use as the largest contributor to greenhouse gases from the agri-food system. Beyond that the UN organisation says that other unspecified farm activities and land-use changes currently account for more than half of the carbon dioxide (CO2) produced from agri-food systems in some regions while in developing countries over the past three decades, it has more than doubled.
The most important trend highlighted in the FAO analysis is “the increasingly important role of food-related emissions generated outside of agricultural land, in pre and post-production processes along food supply chains, at all scales” at the global, regional and national levels.
Coming as the news does in the midst of the global focus on climate change and its likely consequences, the FAO report now compels countries with robust agro-processing sectors to re-visit those sectors to determine where possible, their response to the concerns revealed in the study.
FAO Chief Economist, Maximo Torero, is quoted as saying that the revelation “has important repercussions for food-relevant national mitigation strategies, considering that until recently these have focused mainly on reductions of non-CO2 within the farm gate, and on CO2 from land use change.”
The report says that what the FAO’s recent revelation does is to allow farmers and government planners to understand the connections between their proposed actions under the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, and for consumers to better realise the growing carbon footprint caused across global supply chains.
While the news is likely to be met with concern by the agro-processing sector, particularly in developing countries, Torreo says that the disclosure being made by the FAO “can spur meaningful awareness and action” globally.
The new data generated by the FAO indicates that 31% of human-caused Greenhouse Gas (GHG’s) have their origins in the global agri-foods sector.
Meanwhile, the FAO report also undertakes an analysis of how supply chain factors drive an increase in overall agri-food system greenhouse gas emissions. It says that this information has important repercussions for national strategies to bring those emissions down.
According to the FAO Report, of the 16.5 billion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions from global total agri-food systems in 2019, 7.2 billion tonnes came from within the farm gate, 3.5 billion tonnes from land use change, and 5.8 billion from supply-chain processes. It says that in 2019, deforestation was the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions, followed by livestock manure, household consumption, food waste disposal, fossil fuels used on farms and the food retail sector.
