A swimming pool for a kilo of beef

The Environment Committee in the European Parliament today established clearer rules for food labeling. Most importantly, on most meat products like pork or chicken, the place of origin must be indicated, including the place where the animal was born and the place where it was slaughtered. Furthermore, energy content, amounts of fat, saturated fat, carbohydrates, sugars, protein and salt must be shown on the label as well. If the Council gives its ok, the EP Plenary can adopt the regulation in July 2011 (update: done).

You may remember that in June last year, the center-right in the EP strictly opposed a “traffic light system” on food items that would have meant that unhealthy products would have carried a red light and healthy products a green light (rapporteur then and now was Renate Sommer, EPP). The new regulation-to-be is certainly a good thing with regard to information, provided that it will apply to imports just as it applies to EU products. But I am still missing information on products, namely water and carbon footprint.

I would like to know that by choosing to consume a kilogram of beef, I am consuming 100,000 liters (equivalent to a 10m x 10m x 1m swimming pool) of virtual water. And when I choose to eat pork, I want to be aware that it requires around 8.8 kg of CO2 emissions/kg, transportation not counted. As a consumer, I want to have the possibility of making an informed choice, even though I admit that some consumers would probably be overburdened and confused with so much information.

But my hope is that one of the most important areas of our daily life, namely food quality, could be put under the same kind of political control as the public sector. In the past, enterprises in Europe have repeatedly broken food safety regulations to make a profit, and demanding a transparent production process would force more cheating enterprises out of business.

Calculating environmental data will undoubtedly be expensive for an enterprise*. Yet, it doesn’t appear so difficult for a food chain to conduct worldwide price analyses and to conclude sourcing agreements without taking externalities into consideration. Including water and carbon cost into the analysis only takes it a step further. And maybe, some enterprises would reconsider their sourcing decisions when they are put into the bright light of popular scrutiny.

But for all that, we first need to elect a more radical kind of European Parliament.


*Have a look here (p.15) how Arjen Hoekstra calculated the water footprint.


Update (20/04/2011): Between "set-back" and "right decision" - read here what MEPs say about the package that they adopted. 
Update (12/07/2011): It appears that there is some cautious movement on water footprint and carbon footprint labeling. 

Accountability through the media - what is the value of science?

Two publications of political science that I recently had on my desk made me wonder where science stops and where investigative journalism begins - or vice versa.

In the first article "The Quint", Catherine Gegout investigates the secretive decision-making of Germany, France, the UK, Italy and the US in an informal working group before 2002. The group took decisions and more or less imposed them on the other Member States in the Council of Ministers without the possibility of them participating. Gegout interviewed multiple members of national bureaucracies under cover of anonymity and could slowly make sense of the informal body that Germany, France and the UK did not acknowledge at all and Italy and the US only mentioned in passing on the national websites.

The second article is Gijs Jan Brandsma's PhD thesis "Backstage Europe" in which the Dutch researcher brings light into the secretive comitology system of the European Union. National representatives are often not held accountable for decisions and yet they have a wide discretion in their actions:

(W)ithin only a few minutes the committee rushes through five official votes related to the points discussed before lunch, and the meeting closes instantly. Then Van Veen [name replaced] turns to me and smiles: ‘You saw that? We just spent 50 million here’ (p. 29).

Like Gegout, Brandsma based his research on personal interviews with decision-makers in national bureaucracies - under the cover of anonymity.

For me, these two papers provide a check on decision-makers in the way in which investigative journalism puts a check on them. But they are published in a scientific journal and will only reach the academic community and a few students. In consequence, this check is confined to an elite community. Will any policy changes result from these articles? Is that the intention of the scientist? Does he intend to saw the chair of a decision-maker, or does he see himself as the person providing the saw? And if he wants to actively saw, do policy-makers feel more threatened by revolting scientists than by revolting masses (i.e. classical journalism)?

You could argue that an important function of the European blogosphere is to find the little flaws in European policy-making which slip through the filter of the MSM, thereby providing an additional check on policy-makers. Science has the resources to provide the same.

But it is not enough to debate hot scientific findings in the scientific community. In the interest of public accountability, I would like those discussions to reach the media and the blogging community as well.


Update (30 January 2011): Don't miss the interesting take on the topic by Kosmopolito. And his add-on published here (3 March 2011).