ABSTRACT
The concept of food miles has a simple elegance to it: food that travels great distances obviously consumes more energy during transportation than food grown locally. One calculation places the annual external costs of agriculture in Germany at US$2 billion; in the UK that figure is US$3. 8 billion, and in the USA the total is US$34. 7 billion. The 2010 Environmental Performance Index (EPI), developed by the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy, ranks 163 countries on twenty-five performance indicators tracked across ten well-established policy categories covering both environmental public health and ecosystem vitality. As argued by the Property and Environment Research Center: Market forces also cause economic growth, which in turn leads to environmental improvements. According to the Japan Ministry of the Environment, Japan not only imports more food by volume than the USA, UK, South Korea, Germany, and France but that imported food also travels further on average than food coming into those other nations.
