Accounting for Taste: Contested Accountability Regulation in Food
Background:
One of the principal characteristics during the end of the twentieth century was the mounting public concern in Europe about new (and often unsuspected) threats to human health. In the course of the 1990s there was a particular focus on unsafe food and threats to the human food chain. Fears and uncertainties about the BSE agent, GMOs and dioxin in food attracted a vast amount of media coverage.
The application of science in modern agriculture and the use of large-scale production methods have made it possible to produce food that is plentiful and cheap. However, in the wake of an unrelenting diet of food scares, such methods have undermined public confidence in food production, and in public authorities’ willingness and ability to manage agriculture and exercise effective control over the whole of the food chain. One food scare after another has forced a reappraisal of regulatory strategies and methods and dramatically increased the cost of supporting and managing agriculture. At the same time it has complicated and intensified pressure on the regulatory roles of government.
By the end of the 1990s, both in Britain and in Europe as a whole, there was a general agreement that it was necessary to adopt a truly transparent and rigorous safety-first approach to public health risks, most particularly to risks associated with hazardous materials entering the human food chain 1. The precautionary approach was widely promoted as the most appropriate way of tackling potential threats to well-being. An uncompromisingly cautious approach seemed to make good sense when there were great unknowns, and public anxiety and suspicion about potential harm could not be dispelled. This was despite the knowledge that a precautionary approach might be difficult to apply in practice, could be economically damaging and could also turn out to have been unnecessary.
A series of high-profile problems have caused a decline of public confidence in food safety and the institutions charged with protecting consumers’ interests. Further, the introduction of new technologies such as irradiation and genetically-modified (GM) foods has led to debate about whether consumers needed such technologies. Many of these issues have raised questions about whose interests were being served by food and nutrition policy-making.
These problems have led to major institutional changes across various countries in the EU and attempts are being made to introduce policy-making processes that are more open and consultative. The UK Government, for example, set up the Food Standards Agency (FSA) in 2000, and this was followed by the inception of the Department of Environment, Fisheries and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) in 2001. The Government believed that the creation of the FSA would put an end to the climate of confusion and suspicion which has resulted from the way food safety and standards issues have been handled in the past. This radical new approach was thought to ensure that all future Government activity relating to food would be subject to public scrutiny, and that the public’s voice would be fully heard in the decision-making process.
By giving central responsibility to a single body, whose essential aim is the protection of public health and which has the right to make its advice to Ministers public, the UK Government felt that the effectiveness of controls on food would not be undermined by overlaps, conflicting objectives or incoherence. In creating the FSA, the government sought to remove the conflict of interest that lay at the heart of the MAFF of both promoting the food industry and protecting consumers’ interests.
The evolution of the UK food policy can be categorised into three phases. The first phase represented a period (before the mid 1980s) of a regulatory regime when food and agricultural production systems were regarded as being safe unless scientifically proven otherwise. The State had a rational and scientific basis on which to test relevant public health and food quality assurance policies. This food regulatory approach allowed the State to play a key role in the food supply sector (Marsden et al. 2000), and was, for a considerable period, successful in addressing food safety and other public health concerns relating to food.
In Consuming Interests, Marsden et al. (2000) map out the changes and adaptations that have taken place since the mid 1980s, how food risk is perceived and how new regulatory frameworks emerged. They point to advancement from a government-led regulatory and monitoring model to a new phase (the second phase) dominated by supply chain management, and food standards strategies, designed and applied increasingly by the large multiple food retailers. This second phase of food regulation was driven primarily by the way food safety issues are perceived by large food retailers, leaving the State to act mainly as auditor rather than enforcer of the mainstream process.
Regardless of the fact that the second phase was offering clear improvements in food quality assurance, this approach allowed corporate retailers to distinguish themselves from their non-corporate competitors, and from each other, on the basis of the assurance of quality that they are able to deliver through rigorous supply chain management. This dual public/private model of food regulation has, more recently, also experienced pressure for change as its legitimacy has also been challenged (see Smith et al, 2004 in press).
A third phase in the UK was marked by the establishment of the UK Food Standards Agency (FSA) in April 2000, with an aim to promote food safety and food standards as a non-ministerial department focussing on the protection of consumers and their interests. The James Report had revealed a public unease in relation to the corporatist style of decision-making in the British food and agriculture sector. There was a public perception that the process of decision making was steeped in an ethos of secrecy (involving Ministry of Agriculture Food and Fisheries (MAFF) and powerful farming, industrial and retailer groups). This modus operandi was seen as both benefiting those with vested interests and functioning to the detriment of the public. As a consequence, the government agreed to remove certain key functions and responsibilities from the MAFF and Department of Health (DoH), and vest them in the more independent FSA, with the powers to set stringent food safety standards, as well as to enforce them.
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