Seafood Supply Chains

Governance, Power and Regulation

Miriam Greenwood

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367662172
• eBook ISBN: 9781351664707
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Agribusiness
• Index: Business

This book provides a historical and analytical account of changes in the seafood supply chain in Britain from the mid-twentieth century to the present, looking at the impact of various types of governance.

The governance of marine fisheries has been a contested issue for decades with increasing anxieties about overfishing. In tandem, the rise of aquaculture, fish and shellfish farming, has driven another set of environmental concerns. In the food system, there have been scandals about safety failures and about fraud. At the same time, governments issue advice urging people to eat fish for its health benefits. In the context of these problems and contradictions, how have governments, the food industry and ordinary consumers responded? The author shows how different types of governance and regulation have been used to seek seafood sustainability and food safety and to communicate nutritional messages to the public and with what effects. The book also presents a new model for understanding food chains which combines governance and power approaches with an emphasis on understanding the interests served and the resulting balance of public and private benefits. This shows that the role of state regulation should have greater emphasis in governance and agri-food analysis and that theories about supply chain functioning, including the part played by major retailers and civil society, should be modified by a more nuanced understanding of the role of standards and certification systems.

Although much of the focus is on the UK and Europe, this book provides key lessons internationally for the governance of seafood and other agri-food supply chains. The book will be of interest to students of food policy and those working in the seafood industry or studying for connected qualifications, and more widely to readers with an interest in seafood issues and problems.

1 Governance and its seafood objectives

Introduction: why governance matters for seafood

We experience the food system on a day-to-day basis as predominantly economic, producing through a series of physical and economic processes and delivering to us as consumers for the most part via simple transactions in a store, a takeaway or a restaurant. But in the background, there is a whole other level of decision-making involved which is considered in this book under the heading of governance. Governance is about establishing and ensuring the standards not only of the end products that fetch up on our plates but about all of the processes which got them there. What are these rules, who decides them and most importantly who benefits from them? To what extent are they in the public interest? This book examines such questions by focusing on one type of food, fish or more generally seafood, an important constituent of our diet.

It is also particularly fascinating because with all the tremendous changes in food systems from the middle of the twentieth century into the first decades of the twenty-first nowhere has there been such an extensive transformation as in the supply chain for seafood. Added to revolutionising impacts of massive developments in food processing and storage, in logistics, retailing and foodservice shared with the rest of the food system are radical changes in its two production systems, fishing and farming, that have resulted in a thorough makeover of what seafood is presented to British consumers and how it has become available.

The rules, the governance systems examined in this book, are intended to achieve specific requirements. Three have been selected as particularly important and therefore have been taken as the focal points of the investigation. The first is nutrition, then there are the linked topics of food safety, quality and authenticity and third there is the quest for sustainability.

Seafood, a term that covers both fish and shellfish, is recognised as a vital source of protein and contributor of other nutrients. Although not the most important source of protein in the British diet, it nevertheless has a long-established place within the nation’s food choices. Recent years have seen greatly increased recognition of fish as a particularly healthy food and regular consumption is urged in national nutritional guidelines. This means the need both for adequate supply to be available and for people to recognise its benefits and actually include seafood in their regular eating patterns.

Food that is safe, of high quality and authentic in the sense that what is presented is what it says on the label, is a general expectation but cannot be taken for granted as successive food scandals have shown. A series of problems over the late 1980s and into the 1990s, most notably over Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), broke the trust of the public and while they led to important reforms for better food safety, recent problems such as the horsemeat debacle of 2013 and the contaminated eggs recall of 2017 illustrate the continuation of significant risks in the food system. Seafood too has had problems of food safety and food authenticity which remain important issues for its supply chain.

The third of the three big requirements is about the need to produce seafood sustainably. Longstanding problems of overfishing and relatively new but complex issues round aquaculture, beg questions about how supplies of seafood can be secured on an ongoing basis without irreparable environmental damage.

In order to consider how governance rules do or do not successfully address these three major issues, nutrition plus consumption, food safety and quality and achieving sustainable supply, it is necessary to understand where power lies in relation to the food system. While there are broad structural changes in play, local and historical factors are equally relevant to how specific systems develop so this enquiry concentrates on how governance rules deriving from particular sources of power have affected the seafood supply chain in one country, Britain, and over a specific period from the mid-twentieth century into the first two decades of the twenty-first.

There are two main sources of governance in relation to the food system: one is the state and its connected agencies, the other consists of larger companies in the private sector occupying certain positions which allow them to exercise some control within supply chains. A third potential source is civil society, particularly in the form of NGOs (non-governmental organisations), certain of which have become influential in recent years. The state in a democracy is expected to act in the public interest; whether it does so can be judged in relation to particular issues. NGOs too base their claim to support on the grounds that they are acting in the public interest including such broad concerns as environmental conservation and human rights. Private food businesses as well as narrower commercial objectives are fulfilling fundamentally important public needs and may (or may not) also seek to do so in a way that is consistent with broader principles.

Power can take many forms ranging from absolute control, through varying types of dominance, to modulated forms of influence. Power means access to resources and, particularly for states, ability to control institutions. Other actors such as pressure groups have much less access to resources but can still deploy other forms of influence. In whatever sphere, it is of course individuals within them who make decisions and choose whether or how to exercise power at their disposal, so the way power is used cannot be pre-determined and is open to change.

As there are two main sources of power in relation to the food system, the state and certain food companies, two matching streams of theory are used as guides for making sense of the particular part of the food system being investigated. The former aims to explain how the exercise of power in states has been changing and why, the latter how the food system has been changing and how power has been exercised within it. Conversely, the seafood story can be a test of their validity.

Before discussing this theory, it is necessary to clarify what is meant by governance and how the concept is used in various fields of enquiry. Governance is a concept that has been employed and elaborated in a variety of ways and many different sub-types have been identified including global governance, intra-company corporate governance, participatory governance and good governance in the public sector (Mayntz 2003; Pattberg 2007; Van Kersbergen & Van Waarden 2004). Broadly, in political science writings, it signifies a less hierarchical form of state government, with a focus on sharing and devolution of power mechanisms which may be contrasted with the related concept of regulation as in: ‘The shaping of the conduct of others through network forms of organization involving a wide range of non-state actors but also government, mainly through exchange and negotiation rather than through traditional state-led regulation’ (Ponte, Gibbon & Vestergaard 2011, p. 1). In economics, governance refers to supply chain co-ordination within the private sector in which control is exerted by some parties upon others as expressed in this definition: ‘We use the term to express that some firms in the chain set and/or enforce the parameters under which others in the chain operate. A chain without governance would just be a string of market relations’ (Humphrey & Schmitz 2001, p. 20).

It is a peculiarity that the same concept is used to indicate reduced control in relation to states but more control in commercial relations. However, both approaches to governance are relevant to understanding the seafood supply chain. Hence, in relation to the sea and fisheries, definitions have encompassed both political and economic concepts as put here: ‘The term “governance” is used to refer to the framework of social and economic systems and legal and political structures through which the ocean is managed’ (Allison 2001, p. 934).

Varying perspectives on the notion of governance have been employed in different disciplines and fields of investigation including political science, economics, management, marketing and development studies. The range of conceptual approaches and the aspects of the seafood chain to which they apply are summarised in Table 1.1.

In some of these analyses, ‘governance’ and the related term ‘regulation’ have been used with overlapping meanings, even interchangeably. Both relate to ways of influencing, sometimes controlling, how economic and technological systems work but in this book, regulation refers to the public realm of government action, that is legislation and related systems of rules, while governance, the broader notion, additionally covers private rule setting and various other modes of influence which may also be exercised by business and civil society actors. Thus governance as used here can also refer to public regulation but the reverse does not apply.

Table 1.1 Conceptual approaches to governance relevant to food supply chains

Public...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Preface and acknowledgements
• List of acronyms
• Foreword
• 1 Governance and its seafood objectives
• 2 Governance and change in food chains
• 3 Achieving sustainable supply
• 4 Achieving seafood safety and quality
• 5 Governing seafood consumption
• 6 Governance at the end of the supply chain: seafood retailing and foodservice
• 7 Conclusions: governance and power in the seafood supply chain
• Index