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Economy
Mahesh

07/12/23 08:05 AM IST

Environmental Impact of what we eat

In News
  • The ever-increasing demand for agricultural products is leading to significant social and environmental consequences worldwide
Food based impact accounting
  • The expansion of such imports has contributed to increasing the environmental pressure in the exporting countries.
  • Recent studies have shown that a substantial share of the total ecological impact is due to the displacement of environmental damage through international trade.
  • Tackling these demand-supply dynamics is now a key aspect of international environmental governance and represents a great challenge in achieving the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals and other climate action and biodiversity conservation goals.
  • The current paradigm in measuring impacts and allocating responsibility is based on a production-based accounting method: it measures impacts in the place where the products are produced.
Consumption based accounting
  • Consumption-based accounting accounts for impacts at the point of consumption, attributing all the social and environmental impacts that occurred during production and trade to the final products and to the eventual consumers.
  • That is, the approach urges the consumer (whether social groups or countries) to accept responsibility for the embodied or ‘virtual’ impacts of the product that is being consumed.
Demand Perspective
  • From a demand perspective, the basis for this approach is straightforward: since the pressure on natural and human resources is largely the direct result of consumption practices in developed economies, the responsibility for any consequences due to the production process should fall on those consumers as well.
  • This also reflects arguments of equity and justice surrounding the issue of historical responsibility.
  • Studies suggest that developing economies like India have contributed only 23% of global cumulative emissions and are responsible for about 20-40% of the global average temperature rise since the preindustrial era.
  • A consumption-based approach thus highlights the responsibility of industrialised states to mitigate impact and the rights of developing economies to not carry an excessive burden.
  • This approach also accounts for a growing element of international trade: the existence of trilateral supply chains, where products are produced in one country, processed in a second country, and consumed in a third country.
  • By tracing the flow of intermediate and final products through a global supply chain, it can establish links between where the product is eventually consumed and where its environmental impact is manifesting
Supply Perspective
  • From a supply perspective, the proponents of consumption-based accounting claim that it can encourage cleaner production since producer countries are implicitly encouraged to implement strategies that lower the environmental footprint of their exports.
  • The approach can also go a long way to fix ‘leaks’ in production systems, where production is often taken to jurisdictions that are relatively lenient about production standards (including India).
Benefits
  • The application of this approach to estimate carbon emissions, in the form of embodied emissions, and water use, in the form of virtual water, has also been around in the scientific literature for some time, but has only recently made inroads into policymaking.
  • For example, the European Commission recently initiated steps to ensure products consumed in the European Union have not contributed to deforestation in their country of origin.
  • This measure is expected to significantly reduce carbon emissions from deforestation as well as biodiversity loss, since the European Union is a major consumer of agricultural and forestry products.
  • Currently, major developed economies have an environmental footprint in India because of their consumption of Indian agricultural produce.
  • Conversely, India’s own deforestation footprint outside its borders has increased over the last two decades and is rapidly growing, even if it remains below that of several G-20 countries on a per-capita basis.
Source- The Hindu

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