David Barling

The social aspects of food biotechnology : A European view

The application of the modern biotechnology to food, notably through the use of GM, has raised concern amongst the European public. Values that underlie this public concern about food biotechnology, include perceptions of: trust, choice, need, and care for a sustainable society and natural balance. Recommendations are advocated for addressing these social aspects, in terms of improving consumer choice, promoting greater public involvement in decision making and achieving a sustainable society. A model of risk analysis for genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and genetically modified food that incorporates this social dimension, through the integration of risk analysis with a social impact analysis is proposed, in order to build greater popular trust into the decision making processes.

Nutrition and sustainability: an emerging food policy discourse.

It is well known that food has a considerable environmental impact. Less attention has been given to mapping and analysing the emergence of policy responses. This paper contributes to that process. It summarises emerging policy development on nutrition and sustainability, and explores difficulties in their integration. The paper describes some policy thinking at national, European and international levels of governance. It points to the existence of particular policy hotspots such as meat and dairy, sustainable diets and waste. Understanding the environmental impact of food systems challenges nutrition science to draw upon traditions of thinking which have recently been fragmented. These perspectives (life sciences, social and environmental) are all required if policy engagement and clarification is to occur. Sustainability issues offer opportunities for nutrition science and scientists to play a more central role in the policy analysis of future food systems. The task of revising current nutrition policy advice to become sustainable diet advice needs to begin at national and international levels.

Priority research questions for the UK food system

The rise of food security up international political, societal and academic agendas has led to increasing interest in novel means of improving primary food production and reducing waste. There are however, also many ‘post-farm gate’ activities that are critical to food security, including processing, packaging, distributing, retailing, cooking and consuming. These activities all affect a range of important food security elements, notably availability, affordability and other aspects of access, nutrition and safety. Addressing the challenge of universal food security, in the context of a number of other policy goals (e.g. social, economic and environmental sustainability), is of keen interest to a range of UK stakeholders but requires an up-to-date evidence base and continuous innovation. An exercise was therefore conducted, under the auspices of the UK Global Food Security Programme, to identify priority research questions with a focus on the UK food system (though the outcomes may be broadly applicable to other developed nations). Emphasis was placed on incorporating a wide range of perspectives (‘world views’) from different stakeholder groups: policy, private sector, non-governmental organisations, advocacy groups and academia. A total of 456 individuals submitted 820 questions from which 100 were selected by a process of online voting and a three-stage workshop voting exercise. These 100 final questions were sorted into 10 themes and the ‘top’ question for each theme identified by a further voting exercise. This step also allowed four different stakeholder groups to select the top 7–8 questions from their perspectives. Results of these voting exercises are presented. It is clear from the wide range of questions prioritised in this exercise that the different stakeholder groups identified specific research needs on a range of post-farm gate activities and food security outcomes. Evidence needs related to food affordability, nutrition and food safety (all key elements of food security) featured highly in the exercise. While there were some questions relating to climate impacts on production, other important topics for food security (e.g. trade, transport, preference and cultural needs) were not viewed as strongly by the participants.

Ethical Traceability and Informed Food Choice

Introduction The traceability of food and feed emerged as a focus for political attention and regulation at both national and international governmental levels at the turn of the millennium. The industrialization of food production and manufacture, and the complexities and anonymity of modern supply chains have been accompanied by a new wave of concerns around the safety and quality of the food supply. The emergent concept of keeping track of food products and their different ingredients through the various stages from field to plate offers a potential means of managing some of the recent safety and quality concerns around food. Food traceability covers a range of overlapping objectives, which are outlined below, and so has a wide potential appeal, to regulators, producers, processors, retailers and consumers alike. In this first chapter, we seek to establish the range of ethical concerns around food, drawing from an emerging canon of work on food ethics, and to look at the ways in which the concept of ethical traceability can enhance the public good of existing traceability systems. Traceability relates to where and how foods are produced. It follows that it has the potential to be developed as a tool for providing information to consumers that addresses their concerns about food production.. As traceability retells the history of a food, it can address the ethical, as well as the practical and physical, aspects of that history, enabling more informed food choice. The importance of ethical traceability for consumers is essentially twofold: firstly, it can help them make informed food choices; and secondly, it can act as a (democratizing) means for enabling food consumers to participate more fully as citizens in the shaping of the contemporary food supply. And ethical traceability has a third benefit, this time for food producers, who can use it as a tool for managing the ethical aspects of their own production practices and communicating ethical values about their food products. In the next sections, the nature of food traceability and its differing but overlapping objectives are explained, and the role of ethical traceability is elaborated.

Traceability and ethical concerns in the UK wheat-bread chain: from food safety to provenance to transparency.

Traceability systems that track both physical entities and their less tangible attributes are increasingly widely used in contemporary food supply to meet a range of regulatory and commercial objectives, including a growing number of ethical concerns. Even with a traditional combinable and blended food crop such as wheat to bread there is clear evidence of traceability from the variety and crop in the field through to the mill to the bakery to the shelf. This study examines the traceability systems that have emerged in the wheat to bread supply in the UK, and the ethical concerns that have emerged within this supply process. The study reveals that these ethical concerns are dynamic and evolving and are contested. In the case of the supply chains studied, a priority concern with safety aspects has been followed by an emerging greater focus upon the provenance of the wheat and flour and upon the environmental impacts of the more industrialized supply chains. A study of the traceability schemes in the chains and the views of the stakeholders reflects quite restricted ‘fields of ethical vision’. The governance and the transmission of information along the chains to the final consumer are quite restricted and partial, inhibiting transparency. The realization of greater transparency and ethical traceability to address different moral perspectives will need further changes in the governance and operation of the supply chains.

Sustainable Food Systems in Europe: Policies, Realities and Futures

ABSTRACT This article reviews the food sustainability challenges facing the 27-nation member European Union (EU). It describes the evolution of sustainable development policy in Europe against the background of the EUs evolution and diverse membership, with particular reference to agriculture and food. It argues that while sustainability challenges in agriculture have received considerable policy attention, those facing the powerful manufacturing and retail segments of the food industry have barely been addressed. Given the scale and complexity of issues encompassing the food industry and its environmental, social, economic, and health effects, public health analysis and policy auditing should be “rethought” on the basis of an ecological public health perspective.

The European Union and the Regulation of Food Traceability: From Risk Management to Informed Choice?

The European Union (EU) embarked on a major reform of its regulation of food safety and its food law from the mid to late 1990s, in an effort to ensure a safer and more trustworthy food supply after the political fallout from the spread of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) and infected products across the continent. The EU’s regulation of food has been driven to varying degrees by the need to integrate the European market, from agricultural production subsidy and production management controls, to the harmonization of food standards around the principle of mutual recognition, to food safety and hygiene standards. In the case of BSE, the management of the single market was seen to have failed. Furthermore, the rise of public concerns over food safety resulted in a period of ‘contested governance’, signalling ‘a pervasive sense of distrust that challenges the legitimacy of existing institutional arrangements’ (Ansell and Vogel, 2006:10). This distrust went beyond policy disagreement to embrace deeper concerns about the ability of the prevailing institutions and processes to manage risk in the food supply. This contested governance over food safety coincided with a more general review by the EU of its governance arrangements, and the reform efforts around food safety became tied up in the EU’s political efforts to renew its legitimacy in the eyes of the European publics. The food safety focus led to a reform of the EU’s risk analysis institutions for food safety and the European Commission’s responsibilities around food law, with a revision of the general principles of food law. In short, the reforms for food safety were part of a wider political management effort to rebuild both consumer and citizen trust in the European institutions and processes for the longer term. Within these reforms food traceability appeared as an important element for the operation of risk management. The European market is subject to the pressures of economic globalization, including the challenges of international economic competition, globalizing trends in food sourcing and in food consumption through the mass fast food industry, all underpinned by the neo-liberal reform of international trading rules. Yet, there is a strong pressure to valorize and protect regional varieties of food cultures, habits and customs, both from European producers and processors, and from consumers. Furthermore, the regulators of the European market are pressed to respect the growing ethical concerns of citizens for the preservation of the environment, animal welfare, social justice and solidarity and

The dynamics of the contemporary governance of the world's food supply and the challenges of policy redirection

This paper identifies the governance dynamics and the international policy architecture that frame contemporary policy actions in relation to the food supply and elaborates on key governance tensions that policy makers need to address to feed the world’s growing population by the mid-21st century. Two main dimensions of governance are examined: the international policy space, composed of nation states collaborating through international regimes with other international actors; and the private corporate led governance of the food supply. At the international levels, policy discontinuities and gaps are identified, for example between international environmental regimes and food security institutions. The so-called Washington Consensus has given way to a post Washington divergence of policy approaches amongst states, reflecting the “varieties of capitalism” thesis, and a more multi-polar international policy space over food and agriculture. In the past decade, policy makers have engaged industry in the international pursuit of sustainability, with a focus on policy actions around achieving sustainable consumption and production of food. The resulting contemporary governance trajectories are providing a disjointed but widespread set of policy guidelines with some evidence of convergence. These governance forms are helping to shape the terms of debate but the reliance on industry mediated food sustainability will need to be augmented by stronger political leadership from the individual nation states. Policy advances will need to build on the more collaborative and inclusive forms of governance that are being put in place, and continue to improve the balance of sustainable production and consumption of food.

'European policy on food safety': comments and suggestions on the White Paper on Food Safety.

Abstract The paper provides a summary of the report written for the European Parliaments Science and Technology Options Assessment (STOA) Programme, as a response to the Commissions 2000 Food Safety White Paper. The White Paper made a series of major proposals, including a plan to set up a new European Food Authority (EFA). This paper summarises the comments and proposals on the background and technical arguments in the White Paper. The key issues in food-related public health, which the EFA will have to address, are reviewed. The role of science and technological information in policy-making on food and health matters is explored, as is the core challenge of how to link nutrition and food safety to give a consumer-friendly public health policy for Europe.

Conclusions and Policy Options

Ethical traceability was defined in the first chapter as ‘the ability to trace and map ethical aspects of the food chain by means of recorded identifications’. Traceability is currently mainly used for a range of sometimes overlapping purposes, notably for the management of food safety and public health recall, control and verification, supply chain management and for assurance schemes around food quality and provenance. Only in the latter cases is traceability communicated to consumers; these cases therefore constitute an exception to the general intention of EU Food Law and Codex Alimentarius, which do not consider it appropriate to extend the principle of traceability as far as consumers (as shown in Chapters 2 and 3). The common idea throughout all the studies presented in this book has been that traceability, as used to map the production history of food products, can also be used to map ethical issues in the food chain that relate to production practices. Equally important from the outset was the question of how ethical traceability could be used for enabling informed food choice. By reconstructing or mapping the production history of foods as can be done by means of traceability schemes consumers are empowered to become part of a communicative process concerning food production practices. The analysis in Chapter 4 shows that traceability, i.e. the history of the product, is in fact already used in food advertisements as a commercial communication strategy. In this use of traceability, in advertisements, telling the story of a product ascribes identity to the product, which in turn allows disembedded modern consumers to reconnect with food in a ‘non-superficial’, cultural and ethical manner. The users and beneficiaries of this ethical traceability information about food are primarily consumers. The major ethical concerns of consumers are therefore outlined in Chapter 1. Consumers are substantively concerned about health, animal welfare, the environment, terms of trade, working conditions, etc. Consumers have procedural concerns about the reliability of information, transparency, voice, participation, etc. This analytical distinction is important as it calls our attention to the fact that different measures must be taken in order to address the concerns properly.