Should Food Labelling Show Water Footprint?
by Warren McLaren, Sydney on 04.22.08
The size of food product packaging may have to increase, not contract, if recent thinking on providing more information on environmental impacts was to be enacted. We’ve heard about carbon labelling for food in the UK, now an Australia academic is proposing also adding water impact labelling to the mix.
Speaking from last week’s Water Down Under conference in Adelaide, James Hazelton, a senior economics lecturer from Macquarie University, floated the concept of packaged food carrying a label indicating how much water was used in its production.
"Most of our water usage is embedded in the products we use, rather than drinking or showers and in the garden and so on.” He said. Referring to the UK carbon labelling and water efficiency labels for the likes of washing machines, he pondered, “Could we have a similar scheme for embedded water in the products that we buy?"
"The majority of water consumption is by agricultural industries and in particular things like rice and also meat production," he said. "I think perhaps if consumers knew the quantities of water embedded in those products they might question or they might change their purchasing decisions.” via The Australian, and the ABC
Carbon footprint, sure. Pesticides and chemicals used, sure. Human rights violations of the sweatshops they use, sure.
Water? Not so much.
if shopping carts get the little computers i keep hearing about, product labels will actually be able to get much smaller, and contain vastly greater amounts of information.
imagine, going into the store and getting the cart to compare products on a variety of factors depending on what is most important to the consumer at the moment.
with a system like that, yes, include the water footprint. without, the labeling would require packaging to be worse than it is now.
:D
I think you also need to remember that Australia has some very climate specific issues to do with water, and that Climate Change is not our (or anybody's) only challenge, it is merely one consequence of using limited resources unwisely. As the current 'Climate Change' progresses weather patterns will become more extreme (droughts followed by floods may produce the same net amount of water, but storage and water quality become more problematic), couple this with an exponentially increasing population and drinking water is suddenly a precious commodity I do not want used to be irrigating rice paddies in the middle of our flipping desert (you think i jest...)! So yes, i think careful, simple labeling would contribute to reconnecting people with the consequences of their decisions.