Risk and Food Safety in China and Japan

Theoretical Perspectives and Empirical Insights

Louis Augustin-Jean, Jean Pierre Poulain, Louis Augustin-Jean, Jean Pierre Poulain

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351714471
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Industria alimentaria

Around the world, food has probably never been as safe as it is today. However, periodic crises have aroused consumer anxiety and contributed to a general lack of confidence in the agro-industrial system. The diverse nature of these crises increases governments' and industry difficulties in predicting and tackling them. This book addresses the relations between risk and food theoretically and empirically through case studies from Japan and China.

PartI of the book examines the interaction between theoretical aspects and decision-making. The book theorizes the links between food and risk and analyses the decision-making process in light of risks and governance. The relationship between food risks, governance systems and economic decisions is assessed to explore ideas such as the "pact of nutrition" and the theory of weak signals. PartII examines case studies from China and Japan in the aftermaths of recent crises such as the milk powder scandal in China and food safety following the Fukushima nuclear accident and tsunami in Japan.

This book will be an important resource for scholars, academics and policy-makers in the fields of sociology, economics, food studies, Chinese studies and Japanese studies and theories of risks and safety.

Part I

Theoretical and regulatory framework

1 Beyond weak signals listening theory

From risk analysis to the management of alimentary concerns

Jean-Pierre Poulain

As societies modernized, the topic of food became a subject of debates and controversies. The classical food safety and food security concerns have given way to more controversial issues like “genetically modified products”, animal “cruelty”, raw milk cheese, junk food and its supposed connections with obesity and Non-Communicable Diseases (NCD). Nothing seems self-evident any more. Food industries are targeted; even the farmers, who once had the confidence of the city dwellers, are now attacked on various fronts. Lobby groups are accused of manipulating scientists, the media, politicians and consumers for their own benefit. The system is not running as smoothly as before. A certain tension is rising within the “food social space” over concerns extending from intergenerational responsibility, “What kind of planet are we leaving for our children?”, to intra-generational issues, “How can we divide resources between Global North and South, and, within more developed societies, between rich and poor?”

Different interpretations may be deployed to understand current Western consumers’ relationship with food. We have explored in previous publications (Poulain 2007, 2012b) trends in modern societies, such as the medicalization of food, its judiciarization, development of environmental concerns, notions of heritage or the transformation of human–animal relationships, which are challenging the hitherto dominant “feeding model” of food. So, it is imperative for the authorities in charge of food policies, as well as all agents along the agro-food chain, to listen to and understand the reactions of consumers and citizens. Monitoring the crisis is the purpose of the “weak signals theory”. Different listening and interpretation methodologies are available, but how can they be relevant in the Asian context?

In most Asian countries that have experienced rapid modernization, a “compacted modernization” in Kyung-Sup Chang’s (2010a) words, this context is exacerbated. What Europe and North America have lived through in one-and-a-half centuries, Asia is experiencing in fewer than fifty years. In two generations, some Asian societies have faced rapid structural transformations in the domains of economy, housing and urbanization. The transition from concern for food security to food safety that characterizes the evolution of public awareness about food in the Western context – in other words, less concern for famine and more for the quality of food – did not happen in Asia; in fact, in a compacted modernity, food safety and food security coexist at the same time. So we can speak of a double burden of food concerns as, for instance, in the field of malnutrition, where a coexistence of under-nutrition and over-nutrition can be observed in certain countries (Gillespie and Haddad 2003).

Since the 1990s, following various food crises in Western countries, food issues have come to be organized around the concept of “risk” and the theory of strategic “early warning signals”. Food issues (safety and food security) have now gained a place on political and media agendas. Henceforth, discussions on these topics are delivered by official agencies where experts scientifically evaluate risks and try to understand the more or less rational perceptions of consumers in order to manage and communicate these risks. “Assessment” (by experts), “perception” (by the customers or citizens) and “management” (by the authorities – in economic and political institutions) are the three keywords in risk monitoring.

Within the social sciences, research has been developed which sometimes supports, justifies or validates these theoretical frameworks and thus has helped to organize and legitimize the vision of administrative risk management (Slovic 1987). Sometimes these research projects also delineate and challenge the rational asymmetry on which they were based – on the one hand, the “experts” who are supposedly presenting the “truth”, and on the other, the “laymen” who are more or less “wrong” – by claiming the necessity to articulate the understanding of experts and citizens (Beck 1999). They point out that the diverging understanding of the citizens cannot be reduced to perception bias since they perceive dimensions that are beyond the probabilistic calculation of the risk of mortality and morbidity (Beck 1999; Poulain 2017).

Some anthropological works show that as all human cultures proceed to an orderly organization of the world, they all encounter the same problem. This concerns the definition of a remainder, i.e. what must remain “outside the scope”. Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky (1982) have pointed out the existence of this “twilight zone”. This concept has mainly been used to analyse the variation in what is included and what is excluded in the public perception of risks in different societies. I aim to show here that, from an epistemological perspective, it is worthwhile to study what factors the contemporary framework of risk maintains “out of the field” and to see how these risks, when they emerge, may be undervalued, overvalued or idealized.

Risk and modernized societies

In the past few years, European sociologists have pointed to risk as one of the characteristics of modern societies (Giddens 1991; Duclos 1994; Le Breton 1995; Beck 1999; Fischler 2002; Godard et al. 2002; Gilbert 2003; Roeser et al. 2012). These analyses do not explicitly address food problems, but may contribute to our understanding of some of the issues facing them. For Ulrich Beck, the concept of risk emerges in modern societies when one ceases to explain the events that affect humans by fate, whims of the gods or by nature. Beck dates its emergence from the time of the great discoveries and the development of the technological mastery of nature by man. Risk accompanies the great expeditions and the growth of international maritime trade. We seek to control the future by calculating the risks, by producing statistics on outcomes. This new grid of information, which attempts to read the future, facilitates the transformation of the chain of causality. Thus, any unfortunate event appears to be the result of a series of inadequate decisions. Human responsibility takes precedence over fate. The notion of risk accompanies the discovery of the world, whether geographical or scientific. We proceed from the revealed or traditional model of truth to a truth constructed in the experience of reality. Risk arises when nature and tradition lose their hold, and man has to decide on his own (Beck 1999).

In the first stage in the evolution of the dominance of the risk paradigm in modern societies, it is the risk’s victim who appears to be responsible, as it is he/she who made bad decisions. Then, in the second phase, we look for human responsibilities beyond the victims themselves. For example, victims of an industrial accident were originally considered to be victims of fate. Then, they were seen as personally responsible for what was happening to them, their responsibility was articulated in a moralistic way, and they were considered to be at fault, as the cause of their own misfortune. Lastly, we have come to look for more distant agency, such as officials, on the side of the company and its organization, in the context of seeking a monetized compensation for the damage. The causes and responsibility of an accident are thus dissociated. It becomes the subject of a number of social norms and negotiations aimed at fixing the compensation for injury. These social mechanisms reflect and contribute to the establishment of a process of the judiciarization of society. The emergence of large transnational companies, at both the agro-supply and agro-industry levels, creates the conditions for insolvent liability on a large scale and thus for risk-taking.

At the same time, scientific advances in the identification and analysis of risks allow the setting up of increasingly sensitive surveillance mechanisms. However, the pace of knowledge development, and the awareness of the unknown factors accompanying it, contributes to a growing sense of insecurity. But, above all, they allow the attribution of responsibilities and the identification of culprits, which in some cases may turn into “the designation of scapegoats” (Champagne 2000). Thus, in the first step, the victim of the risk appears to be responsible; he/she made the wrong decisions.

However, these analyses, which have resulted from research carried out on environmental or nuclear risks, do not fully exhaust the issues associated with food risk. While the sociology of risk, founded on the work of Ulrich Beck, poses the risk as one of the characteristics of modernity, if we investigate the “archaeology” of this notion – in the sense that Michel Foucault (1969) gives to it in The Archaeology of Knowledge – it points out risk as resulting from a process of rationalization. For instance, the sociology and anthropology of food studies show food anxiety to be an anthropological invariant of the relationship of people to food in society (Fischler 1988; Beardsworth 1995; Warde 2016; Poulain 2017). Only the way this anxiety is expressed varies according to different social and historical contexts. Some historians have shown, for instance, that since the beginning of the twentieth century in the United States, food anxiety has been exacerbated by the process of the industrialization of the food supply chain (Gaudillière 2002).

On a short historical scale, food crises in Europe seem to have started with the case of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), also known as “mad cow” disease. If this event is indeed a decisive moment in which the risk takes on a new form, in both symbolic and real dimensions, while a deeper historical analysis shows stories of poisoning and other food crises that go far beyond what we have experienced, mad cow disease stimulates us to follow the evolution in the technical and social contexts which have preceded the contemporary crisis, in order to grasp its characteristics and the extent of its impact.

The speed with which modernization has taken place in certain Asian countries led the Korean sociologist Kyung-Sup Chang (2010b) to propose the concept of compressed modernity. It corresponds to a “civilizational context in which economic, political, cultural and social changes occur in an extremely condensed manner both in space and in time” (p. 33). Moreover, in compressed modernity, disparate historical and social elements coexist, contributing to the construction and reconstruction of a complex social system characterized by fluidity (Chang 2017). The phenomenon of the compression of time and space was described in the 1980s by geographer David Harvey (1990). It would be the result of technological innovations developed in the sectors of communication (telegraph, telephone, fax, internet, etc.), transportation and travel (high speed trains and democratization of air transport), which would reduce or sometimes even cancel out spatial and temporal distances. These technological innovations were to be at the heart of economic development and would help to open up new markets, shift spatial barriers, accelerate production cycles and help reduce turnover time. By now we can see that all these things have come to pass.

Beck and Grande (2010) articulate theories of compressed modernity based on Chang’s concept, in terms of “first” and “second” modernity (Beck), and have described it as a situation in which the processes of urbanization, industrialization and liberalization of economic conditions are carried out with such rapidity that the transition from “first” modernity to the “second” stage is almost simultaneous. Beck defines the first modernity as the rise in rationality and the “de-traditionalization” of societies, and the second as a weakening of the legitimacy of the “normative system”, leading to an “individualization of lifestyles” (Beck and Lau 2005). The second modernity would correspond to post-traditional societies, not in the sense that there would be no intergenerational transmission, but in the sense that the normative models would have lost part of their strength and legitimacy. South Korea, Malaysia and China fit more or less well into this framework, but not so Japan, which has undergone a much longer process of modernization.

For Malaysia, Poulain et al. (2014) have empirically shown how the practices related to lunch and dinner are largely individualized, while the social norms for these meals (i.e. what constitutes a “proper meal”) are still collective. This lag between norms and practices shows the weakening of traditional social norms and creates a context conducive to anxiety, which increases the perception of risk. The analysis of the modalities of the socialization of a meal supports the idea proposed by Han Sang-Jin (2015) that we will find original forms of individualization in societies with compressed modernity.

The second modernity is accompanied by the intertwining of various types of risk that take place in particular historical contexts. For example, the coexistence of risks associated with food security and food safety in China, together with a high level of fraud in the society, creates a specific context. The compressed modernity present in some Asian countries corresponds to the colliding of these two forms of modernity. Chang describes two sub-phenomena that have an impact on both the time and space dimensions: “condensation” and “compression”. Condensation “refers to the phenomenon that the physical process required for the movement or change to take place between two time points (eras) or between two locations (places) is abridged or compacted” (2010b: 33–34). Compression is a “phenomenon that diverse components of multiple civilizations that have existed in different areas and/or places coexist in a certain delimited time-space and influence and change each other” (2010b: 34). Reduction of distance in space increases the mobility of food and populations, at the national level (between regions and between rural and urban areas), as well as at an international level (between countries). Through this mobility the interlinking, or crossover, of food cultures – and in certain contexts, the hybridizing or the creolization of cultures – developed (Tibère 2016). This mobility also encompasses a mobility of microorganisms and diseases, and affects the genetic and epigenetic characteristics of populations. The reduction of time pushes the process of designating food cultures as heritage and, more broadly, ways of life, and it promotes the development of cosmopolitan cultures. The compression superimposes different cultures and, in the context of food, the entire food social space is of concern.

It is possible to add another category to the traditional distinction between “food security” and “food safety”, namely, “controversial risks”. This concept covers the problems generated by hazards linked either to technological innovations (such as the application of genetic engineering or molecular engineering, and nanotechnologies) to food, or to the evolution of knowledge, which in itself elucidates and makes visible new dimensions of an issue. These risks are not based on the same body of knowledge and their management is not safeguarded by the same scientific, administrative and political actors. Moreover, conditions that are conducive to the traditional issue of fraud are found in societies that have been rapidly ...