The world emits roughly 3 gigatonnes of greenhouse gases annually during food transportation from production to consumption sites, according to a new study published in Nature Food. This represents 19% of the total food-related emissions, covering food production, land-use change and transportation. The study’s estimate is 7 times higher than the previous ones. According to David Raubenheimer, Nutritional ecologist and co-author of the study, earlier studies only considered the direct transport of particular foods (animal products), leaving out associated products (soybean to feed the animals).
High-income countries are the major contributors. Countries such as the United States, Germany, France and Japan constitute 12.5% of the world’s population yet generate 46 % of food transport emissions.
Contributions from India, Brazil, Australia and Argentina are tied to exports. Access to improved technology and expanding food trade has helped these nations rapidly scale up food production in recent decades.
Still, low-income countries, according to the analysis, cause only 20% of emissions despite supporting about half of the global population.
The researchers also found that transporting vegetables, fruits, cereal, flour, sugar and dairy products has a heavy carbon footprint and surpasses that of animals. Plant products are with high transport emissions because of their bulk and the fact that they often require refrigerated transport. Emissions from transporting vegetables and fruits are twice that of producing them. In contrast, transportation emissions from animal products are less. But production generates high emissions in other ways, such as the impact on land and high methane emissions.
The 3 gigatonnes can also be categorized in terms of imports, exports (international) and domestic transportation. A majority (1.7 GT) is caused by domestic transport emissions, while 1.3GT by international transport emissions.
The world could reduce emissions by 0.38 GT by replacing imports with locally grown food. According to David Raubenheimer, eating locally is ideal, especially in affluent countries. The study recommended that advanced nations invest in clean transport and incentivise food businesses to reduce emissions linked to producing and distributing food commodities.
Prof. Manfred Lenzen said in a statement, (professor of Sustainability Research at Integrated Sustainability Analysis in the School of Physics at the University of Sydney) “Both investors and governments can help by creating environments that foster sustainable food supply,”
The researchers will explore the impacts of diets in their future studies. This is a very important question given the global environmental crisis and the big impact that food has on the environment.

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