The European Union is continuing efforts to clamp down on companies misleading consumers by dishonestly claiming food products are from sustainable sources.
From next year Brussels plans to make it mandatory for food producers to use just one harmonised or unified system to calculate eco-scores, which will give consumers easily understood information on labels, as well as prevent greenwashing by companies.
But Irish farmers are seeing it as unnecessary bureaucracy, when they are already providing data to trace the source of food under the EU’s Farm to Fork policy.
According to Michael O’Dowd, the chairman of the Irish Farmers Association in Sligo, the sector is very green.
“We know as farmers, particularly in the west of Ireland, that our farms are very carbon friendly, we don’t over use fertilisers or chemicals. You know it’s a top quality product.”
Mr O’Dowd is not convinced that a single system of compiling eco-scores for food products will work.
“Very hard to see how you could harmonise all the countries in Europe, because all the countries have a different farming practice. We are a grass, naturally green country in Ireland and it wouldn’t be simple in Spain and places like that to have a harmony in agricultural products,” he said.
Michael O’Dowd maintains that Irish farmers are abiding by the EU’s farm to fork policy, “we have that in place in Ireland and at the moment every thing is traceable as it is.”
Eddie Davitt, who has worked the same land as his father and grandfather, close to Knocknashee, Sligo’s Hill of the Fairies, believes eco-scoring is creating more work for farmers.
“This scoring system seems to be a new phase in Europe and within our department of agriculture here,” he says.
We’re going through our land to see what flowers and weeds we’re growing. I’m a long time farming and I know the type of plants that grow on my land and I know how high the heather should be and how the grass should be.”
“I don’t know if Europe is going the right route. I would be very reluctant to see them going down the road of a score card on how we produce our food.”It’s more about red tape and ticking a box than producing good quality food. I think we have a record here in Ireland of producing some of the highest quality food in the world.”
However it’s hard to argue against consumers having enough information to decide if what they buy is produced from sustainable sources.
A simple easy to understand eco-score on the label on food would be preferable, according to Dr Aoife-Marie Murphy, Sustainable Nutrition Manager at the Kerry Group, one of the world’s biggest suppliers of ingredients for food and drink.
There’s over a hundred eco labels and they can be anything from an organic label all the way to a score like a traffic light system. This proliferation of labels has confused consumers,” she says.
But does Dr Murphy think a single unified or harmonised system for calculating eco-scores would clamp down on greenwashing, companies misleading consumers about the sustainability of their products.
“Consumers are looking for more sustainable products so people are capitalising on that, looking to confuse consumers.”
“A product is only misleading if you don’t have the data to back it, so you need the data and that’s an issue for the market at the moment, because a lot of data is based on assumptions.”
Kerry Group’s Dr Aoife Marie Murphy also believes that the current system of data about the nutritional value of food on labels is a blue print for eco-scores.
Wageningen University in the Netherlands has carried out a lot of research into eco-scoring and the way it influences consumers.
“The average consumer that goes to a supermarket buys maybe 50 products in an hour, so they have to make decisions in a few seconds. So very simple information they can see immediately on the package gives them overall information on the sustainability of the product,” says Koen Boone the Coördinator of Sustainable Value Chains at WUR.
He also believes the nutritional value on labels, currently in use, is a guide on how to adopt eco-scores.
“Most of the initiatives now have an A to E score, which is comparable with the nutri-score, which we already have in a lot of north west European countries that gives information about the healthiness of food. The idea is to copy something simple for environmental information so that with colour coding and A to E consumers can easily see if something is sustainable or not.”
“Taking all the different impacts into account such as greenhouse gas emissions water pollution all those things integrated into one score.”
The Dutch expert on sustainable food sources also believes a harmonised system of working out an eco-score for food would make greenwashing more difficult.
“I think it’s widespread. I think a lot of companies are working on sustainability because of their image, so then it becomes attractive to exaggerate claims a little bit, to give a little better picture than the reality.”
“For a lot of big brands the largest part of their value is their reputation, the brand value and if it’s easier to compare one company’s products against another, because they use the same indicators, there will be more incentives for companies to be more sustainable,” he says.
The Belgium based supermarket group, Colruyt, which also operates in France and Luxembourg has been using its own eco-scoring system for food.
According to Veerle Poppe, the retailer’s sustainability strategist, educating customers is a challenge, especially when many could not be bothered to read the label.
“The first step you take when you are introducing such a label is to make sure that the consumer understands what we are talking about, hence the brand awareness and campaigns on tv and radio and social media explaining the label.”
But is it more expensive to buy food from sustainable sources at Colruyt?
“Products with an A and B score do not cost more than other products. What we see is more plant based products have more A and B scores, whereas animal based products tend to have a bit worse scores,” she says.
The system of LCA, Life Cycle Analysis, to work out an eco-score divides experts, especially when less weighting is given to how far the product has travelled to get to the supermarket shelf.
“Transport does not have a high impact in the Life cycle analysis (LCAs) and the farming phase has more impact. “It is sometime hard for consumers to understand that packaging and transport do not have as much impact as farming,” she says.
“LCA Life cycle is the process of the beginning of the product at the farming phase to the end use at the consumer side.”
Colruty’s Veerle Poppe insists the retail industry cannot ignore the impact of climate change.
“Our competitors understand we have to do something, the time is now. When we look around us and see what is happening with the climate. The temperatures in the south of Europe and the flooding. We have to do something now and we cannot postpone things,” she says.
Organic food and drinks producers are very apprehensive about eco-scoring.
“Instead of fighting greenwashing, labelling schemes like the eco-score contribute to it, because they mislead consumers about whether the products they buy is organic or not,” says Eric Gall, the deputy director of IFOAM Europe, which represents organic food and farming operators.
“Life Cycle Analysis tends to favour products from intensive agriculture, whereas other methodologies take into the account the use of synthetic pesticides and synthetic fertilisers and the impact of different production methods on biodiversity.”
Mr Gall says “one of the problems with eco-scores is that it gives good scores to fruit and vegetables and bad scores to meat. But it doesn’t make any difference let’s say between an organic apple, or an apple treated with 30 different toxic pesticides.”
Despite concerns about methods of calculating eco-scores shoppers do want more information, that is according to BUEC, the European Consumer Organisation in Brussels.
“Consumers do want sustainability information to be made mandatory,” says Emma Calvert, senior food policy officer at the organisation.
She is also urging the European Union to act more decisively against greenwashing.
“As more consumers get interested in sustainability and the environmental impact of their food, we’re seeing a kind of explosion in green claims. So we would like the Commission to hurry up with their work on this so we can have some clarification.”
“We should not be seeing these kind of claims they are scientifically inaccurate.”
Emma Calvert also favours a harmonised eco-score system taking lessons from the process of putting information about the nutritional value of food on labels.
“At least for consumers there is a transparency element. You see a nutrition label on the front of the pack and you can actually check it on the back. That transparency is really missing for sustainability labels. It’s obviously not very easy for consumers to first of all understand the impacts of the food they buy but also then to check that kind of information is very difficult.”
When I asked some shoppers in Ballybofey, in Donegal, if they diligently read the labels on food I got some interesting reactions.
Responses ranged from “I’d be more interested in the sell by date,” or a request to keep the “information on one label and as brief as possible,” as well as a blunt “I never read the label to be honest.”
Restaurants across Ireland which promote themselves as cooking fresh food from sustainable sources are likely to favour a simple unified eco-score system.
“This would be helpful if it was standardised across the European Union,” says Declan Smith, the head chef at the Smugglers Creek Inn, a cliff top pub and restaurant in Rossnowlagh, on Donegal’s coastal stretch of the Atlantic Way.
“We have staff from all over the European Union working with us and it would help in scoring recipes in general if you knew what your products were.”
“It’s quite important to our customers that the food is sourced as local as possible and especially all the fish that we serve comes from the local port in Killybegs.”
But does the chef think people will pay more for food with a good eco-score, signalling it comes from sustainable sources?
“It’s becoming trendy for people to have more locally sourced food and because Ireland is a high wage economy it can be more expensive to source the food.”
Declan Smith also favours a harmonised system of eco-scores.
“With some of the ingredients we use they are sourced in Germany and France and if they were using different requirements than we have, how would you calibrate it in Ireland?”
“And even in Europe at the moment there are different allowances for recycled packaging some countries do allow a better score for that and some countries do not.”
Farmers in Ireland may criticise eco-scores on food labels as yet more bureaucracy from Brussels, but as we live in the digital era it is hard to argue against consumers having more information about the source of what they eat.
The Sligo farmer Michael O’Dowd says when it comes to Ireland being green “we’re trying to be the best boys in class in Europe and doing that we could end up destroying our agriculture economy.”
The eco-score for food in the European Union will soon be compiled using a harmonised system and printed on the label, but of course consumers have the freedom to ignore it.
A memorable quote from the renowned Irish author, George Bernard Shaw, seems appropriate.
“Progress is impossible without change and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.”
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Yes. But who defines progress?