Let’s start with a sobering statistic – about a quarter to one third of the pollution emissions in China is generated by the production of goods for export. CNN and other US media reported this statistic earlier this year, but focused on something else that was in the same report.
China’s production of goods for export was polluting America, as the emissions blew across the Pacific, they said.
To us, that seems like a strange perversion of logic. Surely, the countries in the developed world have derived huge benefit from relocating their factories to Asia, not least because they enjoy cleaner air as a result.
The real message, surely, is that we as consumers are still responsible for a large part of the pollution in China.
At some time or another, all of us have almost certainly bought goods that contributed to this pollution.
Not all producers in China are bad. Many of them take great care to limit their emissions (and the organic movement there is growing fast), but many others don’t. The problem for us as consumers is that we generally have no real way of knowing which goods were produced by serious polluters and which weren’t.
And the biggest problem with pollution in the developing world is not the greenhouse gases that threaten to affect us all at some distant point in the future. It’s the intense, localized pollution that causes cancer clusters and heavy metals poisoning, that devastates lives right now in places we’ve never heard of.
Time to meet your maker
At the farmers market it feels great, but strangely anachronistic, to buy bread or cheese or chocolates from the people who made them. Shopping in this way may remind you of something from a lost past, but we also think it’s the future, and here's why.