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You're forgetting something - while your thesis that food costs are directly associated with fuel costs is correct, the reason that this is true is because fossil fuels comprise a large portion of the energy budget of food production.

Doing away with food imports could be seen as understandable if international transport played a dominant role in the food chain's greenhouse gas emissions.

But in the UK 's case -- where much of the research into the "food miles" concept has taken place -- that doesn't seem to be the case. A sturdy 85 percent of UK food transport-related emissions actually derive from domestic road deliveries according to the DFID. Road freight traffic in the UK grew by 67 percent between 1980 and 2001, with the average journey length also increasing by 40 percent.

By comparison, international freight contributes 11 percent of UK food transport-related emissions -- that's less than one-tenth of one percent of the UK 's overall emissions, the DFID says.

Transportation as a whole contributes 2.5 percent of the food chain's emissions, says FCRN. Food refrigeration, on the other hand, accounts for as much as 18 percent (and notably 3.5 percent of the UK 's entire greenhouse gas emissions).

The whole transport issue initially came to the fore after the "food miles" concept was coined in Europe to illustrate how fossil fuel-intensive the global food distribution network had become.

But the relative blame that the transport sector should be taking for this is debatable.

In the U.S., up to 20 percent of the country's fossil fuel consumption goes into the food chain, according to the UN's Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), which points out that fossil fuel use by the food systems in the developed world "often rivals that of automobiles".

To feed an average family of four in the developed world uses up the equivalent of 930 gallons of gasoline a year -- just shy of the 1,070 gallons that same family would use up each year to power their cars.

The average developed world diet uses 1,600 liters of fossil fuels each year, according to the U.S. based Organic Consumers Association (OCA). Only 256 of those liters come from transporting the food, says OCA.

By contrast, a whopping 496 liters goes into the chemical fertilizers used during the food growing stage, representing well over one third of the food chain's entire fossil fuel consumption.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/dgOTte_KZDo/story01.htm

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