Life Cycle Assessment in the Agri-food sector

Summary

Focus on sustainable (agricultural) production should go hand in hand with the quest for sus-tainable (food) consumption. This idea is in agreement with principles of Integrated Product Policy, which is the modern chain based and product-oriented approach to environmental im-provement and regulation adopted by national environmental authorities, the EU Commission, UNEP and increasingly also by private companies. The regulation of agri-environmental problems has so far focused on improvements in farm production systems in relation to local effects. This approach does not take into consideration the developments in food processing and consumer choices as well as more global environmental effects. In the coming decades production and consumption of livestock products and processed food is expected to increase significantly and the globalisation of the food systems will continue. Therefore, as much as ever there is a need for a complementary focus on the environmental impact per unit of food produced including the whole production chain and taking into account global effects of dif-ferent systems for food provision and consumption patterns.
Food consumption is one of the major causes for resource use and environmental impact by modern households. But the relative importance of these burdens in the primary production, industrial food processing and kitchen preparation respectively differ among products. It is, however, not easy to define and compare the environmental burden from different choices of food. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a tool for an aggregated description of emissions, waste and the resource use from soil to kitchen per unit of different food items. The method-ology for LCA in the food sector has been developed during the last decade and progress in terms of methodological robustness and data availability has been demonstrated - among oth-ers – at a series of LCA-food conferences organised in Brussels (1996, 1998) and Gothenburg (2001). The present proceedings from the Fourth International Conference of LCA in the Agri-Food Sector presents a number of papers based on floor- and poster presentations show-ing both the recent advances in methodology and inventories and the wide range of applica-tions and objectives for LCA in the food sector.