LCA Food 2012 in Saint Malo, France! - Manifestations et colloques ...

GROUP 4, SESSION B: CROP PRODUCTION SYSTEMS 8 th Int. Conference on LCA in the
Agri-Food Sector, 1-4 Oct 2012
117. Environmental assessment of rice production in Camargue,
France
Ancia Drocourt 1 , Yannick Mervant 1 , Franc ois Milhau 1 , Mireille Chinal 2 , Arnaud Hélias 1,3,*
1 2
Montpellier SupAgro, 2 Place Viala, 34060 Montpellier Cedex 2, France, Sud Céréales, Mas des Saules
RD 6113, 30300 Fourques, France, 3 INRA, UR50, LBE, Laboratoire de Biotechnologie et de
l’Environnement, Avenue des Etangs, 11000 Narbonne, France, * Corresponding author. E-mail: arnaud.helias@supagro.inra.fr
In a context where environmental labelling tends to become certain, life cycle inventories of agricultural
productions are key elements for the food product assessment. The herein study focuses on rice crops in the
Camargue area (south of France), and the functional unit is “to produce one ton of rice”.
The system is limited to the field operation, and does include transportation after harvest and recycling of
agricultural machinery. The inventory is based on generic data available in the ecoinvent database. Cultural
practices and crop yield from real data of Sud Céréales (an agricultural cooperative, main rice producer to
Camargue) are used to describe the system. In this context, consistent with the regulation, crop residues are
ploughed in. Models proposed in the literature are used to assess the emission from fertilisation, and methane
release from rice fields is calculated using the IPCC model (IPCC 2006).
The life cycle impact assessment is carried out with the Impact 2002+ method (except for climate change
where characterisation factors over 100 years are used). Results are put in front of American rice production
available in the database. This comparison shows the environmental benefit of the Camargue rice (a decrease
of 42% for greenhouse gas emissions) mainly due to more efficient submersion practices. Fertilisation (production
and crop emission) is the most polluting step for all impacts; methane release is also a problem (Fig.
1). A sensitivity analysis underlines the lesser importance of agricultural machinery and the importance of
the model chosen to assess the fertilisation. A decrease in yield would also cause greater damage to the environment;
this is in accordance with a "mass based" functional unit.
References
IPCC, 2006. 2006 IPCC Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories, Prepared by the National
Greenhouse Gas Inventories Programme. Eggleston, H.S., Buendia, L., Miwa, K., Ngara, T., Tanabe,
K., (Eds). IGES, Japan.
829