“Our biggest worry is that the main buyers, the supermarkets, first threatened to refuse airfreighted foods and now by Easter some of the largest will be labelling airfreighted foods with an aeroplane sticker,” Abraham Barno, agricultural attaché at the Kenyan High Commission in London, told frehinfo.
“This is a very grave danger as we believe highly agitated UK consumers will associate the aeroplane symbol with global warming and the shelf space devoted to Kenyan products will shrink. It is a very serious threat as 96 per cent of our horticultural exports are air-freighted.”
The matter is being discussed at the highest level in Nairobi and the next move for the Kenyan government is to take the matter to the European Economic Partnership Agreement. “Developing countries should not be penalised on the basis of the carbon footprint of their exports in this way, especially when we enjoy carbon credit,” said Barno. “What we know is that this is affecting us in one of our fastest-growing sectors. There is now a lot of effort in Kenya going into the lobbying process.”
The High Commission is also talking to a public relations firm in London. “We are looking at how to go about a sustained campaign and also appealing to the supermarkets to do something to show that when produce is air-freighted from Kenya it is not a threat in terms of climate change.”
Coverage of the issue in Kenya has been highly emotive with UK consumers accused of “back-stabbing” Kenya in one newspaper. The horticultural industry of the East African nation, one of the region’s major export success stories, is described as “not anywhere near the biggest culprits” with reference to the 9.4 tonnes of carbon emitted each year by every UK resident.
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