The New Regulation and Governance of Food

Beyond the Food Crisis?

Terry Marsden, Robert Lee, Andrew Flynn, Samarthia Thankappan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9781135910013
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Sustainable Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Major questions surround who, how, and by what means should the interests of government, the private sector, or consumers hold authority and powers over decisions concerning the production and consumption of foods. This book examines the development of food policy and regulation following the BSE (mad cow disease) crisis of the late 1990s, and traces the changing relationships between three key sets of actors: private interests, such as the corporate retailers; public regulators, such as the EU directorates and UK agencies; and consumer groups at EU and national levels. The authors explore how these interests deal with the conundrum of continuing to stimulate a corporately organised and increasingly globalised food system at the same time as creating a public and consumer-based legitimate framework for it. The analysis develops a new model and synthesis of food policy and regulation which reassesses these public/private sector responsibilities with new evidence and theoretical insights.

Part I
Exploring the Anatomy of the Food Crisis

1
The Anatomy of the Food Crisis

Regulating the Risk Geographies of Agri-Food in the 21^st Century

INTRODUCTION

Agri-food studies are studies of the changing and ever more complex relationships between three spheres: economy, policy and space. At root, unlike other forms of commodity production or economic activity, however much the dominant systems of economic and political change may attempt to detach themselves from space, in their operation and regulation of the production and consumption of foods; space, through its embedded nature, geography, ecology, can never be entirely avoided or completely appropriated.

As we shall see in this book, particularly in the first years of 21^st century, the relationships between these often contested spheres take on new and more complex dimensions. This is a period in which, however much the more liberalised food system celebrates its technological sophistication and increasing ability to service us all with an expanding array of novel food goods, this is tempered by the realisation that ‘nature hits back’; often by creating what seem to be a continuing catalogue of new food ‘crises’, risks, concerns and scares. Indeed, as one result of this, contemporary ‘food journalism’ has now become a central feature of our mass media, focussing either on the ‘scares’ themselves or on how to create individual or more collective moralities which attempt to avoid them. It is truism to say that food has become a contested arena (Ansell and Vogel, 2006). It is a more academic question to ask who, how and by what means should key interests—government, private interests, consumers—hold the authority to decide on how these production and consumption arena should be organised and regulated. This is a central question of this book.

What seems to be clear is that however more sophisticated and globalised the food system becomes, the more it seems to be liable to increased contestations, periodic risk and crisis. This is indeed a major paradox of contemporary food system modernisation. This book is about conceptually and empirically understanding these tensions, and especially how current governments and regulatory bodies attempt to balance and deal with these economic, political and spatial demands that the conventional and increasingly globalised food system creates.

More specifically, it asks how the vast array of regulatory bodies balance and deal with the innate conundrum of continuing to stimulate an advanced capitalist and corporately -organised food production and consumption system at the same time as maintaining and reproducing a public and consumer-based legitimating framework for it. This is, of course, a dynamic, and as we shall see, a highly contingent process. It is also one which through its study demands conceptual as well as empirical development from an interdisciplinary social science perspective. More than ever, we can suggest, a focus on the question of food governance—that is the combinations of economic, political and spatial spheres which shape both how food is produced, processed, sold and eaten—is a key window on the public questioning and sustainability of the 20^th and 21^st century modernisation project itself.

THE ANATOMY OF AGRI-FOOD AS A LONG-RUN SUSTAINABLE ACTIVITY

In the second part of the 20^th century the concept of sustainable agriculture and food became increasingly used to denote a variable but significant rupture with what has been termed the more dominant agri-industrial model of agriculture and rural development. The past twenty years, since the late 1980s, has been characterised by a growing crisis tendency in this latter dominant model, as well as an increasing call and search for alternative systems. In general terms these alternatives can be defined as referring to the environmental or ecological soundness of the agricultural production processes or the wider agri-food commodity chain. This implies that with respect to renewable nutrient cycles, such sustainable systems are those that are capable of being continued indefinitely, or at least continuous over considerable generational time. In many zones we might argue that agricultural systems have long been sustainable (since Neo-lithic times) in that whilst they have been subject to considerable adaptation and technical change, they have sustained in reasonable shape the main factors of production needed for the continuance of food production both in and of place. And they have managed to do this without significantly destroying the local and production-based ecologies on which they are based.

It has also long been established that agriculture, as a production process, is quite distinctive in that it both produces and transforms nature, through the (re-) production of livestock and plants, at the same time as being physically and geographically reliant upon nature as a means and condition of production (most notably soils, micro-climate, topography and vegetation complexes). Agriculture, and especially a sustainable agriculture, thus efficiently transforms as well as re-creates its space or terriour as part and parcel of the production process. Usually the indefiniteness of sustainable agriculture makes primary reference to a set of ecological principles, and it is also linked to not so much an end-point sui generis, but rather as a continual and increasing contested process. In this sense it needs to be recognised that there will always be ways in which agro-food systems can be adapted in ways which makes them more (or less) ecologically, economically and socially reproducible.

In general and abstract terms then we might argue that the process of sustainable agriculture and agri-food must infer a coordinated relationship between organisms and environment, which is adaptive to location, season, creating bio-physiologically or ecologically mutual benefits which give complementary status to the different components of the production system. Such explicit complementarities were a central part, for instance of ancient Chinese classical works written about 3000 years ago. Here agriculture needed to be practised as part of the harmony between heaven, earth and humans; and between the careful utilisation of the five key elements of the universe: metal, wood, water, fire and earth. These principles and adaptive techniques were passed down under systems of ‘inherited experience’. For instance in the Tai Lake basin area of South-east China, the grain-livestock-mulberry-fish integrated production system has existed for more than a thousand years, by means of a cycling based on ecological food chains and synergies between the different but complimentary production systems. In most advanced countries, and indeed progressively at a global scale, in the past twenty years there has developed a realisation that the dominant agri-industrial system has departed significantly from these long-run-ning sustainable principles. There has developed what some authors have called a significant ‘metabolic rift’ (Foster, 1999) as the systems of ever more intensive production, processing and consuming foods have departed and detached themselves from the natural rhythms; and technologies have been progressively employed in ways to uphold the ‘unsustainability’ of this ‘met-abolic rift’.

The most notable but not exclusive crisis erupted in the UK in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s with the arrival of BSE in British cattle and its reluctantly accepted transfer into vCJD in the human population. This was notable in that it created not only a long-running food safety crisis but also a political and economic challenge both inside central government and in the farming and agri-food sectors (see Zwanenburg and Millstone, 2003; Marsden et al., 2000). This chapter does not intend to re-analyse the causes and consequences of the BSE crisis (but see Chapter 4). Rather, it takes these as a point of departure to assess, in many ways what has been a period since the late 1990s, of crisis management in the agri-food sector, both in the UK and more widely in the EU. We see this process, in gen-eral terms, as the development of what we can term the development of a hygienic-bureaucratic State—that is, a model of a more complex set of state intervention and corporate responsibilities which attempted to ameliorate, as opposed to radically reform, the social and political architecture of agri-food governance, in ways which fend off and legitimate the risks of the intensive agri-industrial model.

In this introductory chapter to the book we will first trace some of the key developments in the private and public regulation of foods since the late 1990s—essentially what we might call the ‘post-BSE period’ of food regulation both in the UK and in Europe more generally. Second, we will explore how a combination of public risk factors surrounding foods have begun to shape this more complex and contingent regulatory terrain. In conclusion we will outline some key conceptual themes that this raises, and which will be subject to more detailed treatment in the rest of the volume. This chapter will then be followed by more detailed treatments of the specific regulatory handling of a series of new risks (Foot and Mouth and GM, Chapters 2 and 3), and the evolutionary development of the role of the State in agri-food in Chapter 4.

In our earlier studies of agri-food governance in the 1990s—a period in the midst of the BSE crisis—we concluded that in the UK at least, what we were witnessing was the emergence of a ‘company state’. Quoting, Wyn Grant (1993), we argued that:

Britain displays many characteristics of a company state. In a company state the most important form of business-state contract is the direct one between company and government. Government prioritises such forms of contract over associative intermediation. (1993:14)

We argued that it was not only at the level of policy formation that such relationships were found, but also at the level of policy implementation. Our extensive and multi-level evidence, gathered throughout the early 1990s, supported the view that combinations of public and private (particularly corporate retail) interests were now working together in sophisticated networks to secure the implementation of policy goals. This also created a marginalisation process with, for instance, consumer groups being largely outside both the central policy formation and implementation process. A primary goal of the new combinations of public and private interests was to both create and sustain vibrant, relatively low-cost and inflation-proof consumer markets in food. The rest of this chapter introduces how these food crisis tendencies have continued to be ‘managed’; indeed, how they continue to ‘maintain the unsustainable’. It also highlights some of the continuities and changes apparent in the continuing ‘management of crisis’ of the agri-industrial system.

THE ANATOMY OF THE (RISKY) CONTEMPORARY AGRI-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX

The BSE crisis is now, of course, over twenty years old; and, over the past decade both governments and private sector interests have significantly adjusted to it. Nevertheless, as is witnessed with the proliferation of more recent risks, for instance, those associated with Foot and Mouth Disease, GM, Avian flu, or ‘Blue-tongue’, the agri-industrial model of agri-food has, quite strikingly and resiliently tightened its grip upon not only on UK and European, but also global food systems and spaces. Perhaps paradoxically, what is so striking about the contemporary governance of agri-food are the ways in which it has built up resilience in dealing with it’s own unsustainable and metabolic vulnerabilities at the same time as protecting it abilities to create surplus values and profits. This book attempts to understand this conundrum.

We therefore need to recognise that the inherent ‘crises’ associated with the human and ecological health risks of the intensive agri-food system, which have, of course, been continually articulated over the past two decades, have (perhaps surprisingly) avoided a profound restructuring of the agri-food system itself, in ways which might have ushered in a more sustainable system of food provision and consumption. Indeed, the story is one which represents quite the opposite. As will be outlined below what we have witnessed has been an intensification and further embeddedness of the agri-industrial model. An initial and somewhat perplexing question has thus become: how, given the series of public and regulatory problems besetting contemporary food systems have they managed to ‘sustain the unsustainable’?

This book will detail the complex processes of adjustment and regulation that has been made since the late 1990s with regard to the UK and Europe. However, underlying these, it needs to be recognised at the outset that it is an agri-industrial regulatory system, or anatomy, which is still crisis ridden, highly risky, and profoundly unsustainable with regard to the long-run historical principles of agri-food sustainability introduced previously. In the rest of this chapter we will first document some of the key developments in the agri-industrial model over the past decade. Second, this will be followed by an outline of how this has become part of wider social and regulatory concerns with contemporary food risks.

Key Developments in the Agri-Food System in the 2000s: Continuing to Sustain and Contain the Unsustainable?

Increasing Vulnerability

Twenty years after the onset of the BSE crises, why ha...

Table of contents

• Routledge Studies in Human Geography
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Abbreviations
• Preface
• Methodological Note
• Part I Exploring the Anatomy of the Food Crisis
• Part II The Evolving Hybrid Model
• Part III Operating the Hybrid Model
• Part IV Key Contemporary Dynamics of Regulation
• Appendix to Chapter 5
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index