In the UK, high profile food safety concerns and a new focus on food safety began with the emergence of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy or “mad cow” disease in British cattle from 1986 onward. The BSE crisis, along with and later scares such as the appearance of foot and mouth disease in cattle and sheep, and the contamination of Belgian animal feed with dioxin in 1999 drew attention to production practices in livestock supply chains and to pathogenic food safety as a large-scale societal risk embedded in the industrial food system. The epidemiological identification of BSE and the subsequent confirmation of its link to new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease in humans sparked a massive controversy within British and European food production and regulation, shining a light on government mismanagement of the crisis and the role of food safety in international trade. These concerns left deep scars in the UK regulatory framework for food safety, eroding public perceptions of the authority of scientific experts and members of government to provide guidance in the face of salient public safety threats . Ultimately, this breakdown of public regulation led to the eventual creation of the European Food Safety Authority as an oversight body and a reorganization of European and UK food safety controls to focus on “farm to fork” management of agricultural safety and quality . These combined issues in modern animal husbandry called into question the basic safety of intensive agricultural production systems, and the British government’s handling of the BSE crisis ultimately shook consumer confidence in the fundamental ability of public food regulation to adequately protect consumers from harm . This constellation of food safety failures prompted the UK government to adopt its seminal 1990 Food Safety Act.
In reaction to BSE and other scandals, and as part of an attempt to incorporate EU language and priorities at the regulatory level , rolling grow benches the Act placed a high value on achieving traceability in food supply chains. Importantly, the 1990 Food Safety law also established a new “due diligence defence” for assigning criminal responsibility in cases of food safety violations, an element that has played a strong role in driving much of the UK retail industry’s focus on food assurance schemes and production standards . The language of the defense states that a food provider is responsible for any food safety risk that they could “reasonably” have been expected to know about or have acted to solve. During the same period, the United States government responded to domestic and international foodborne illness outbreaks by formally adopting a new food safety management protocol first developed by NASA to ensure the safety of food sent into space for American astronauts, and later broadened to minimize risk in a range of product supply chains . Known as Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points , this protocol directs producers to make themselves aware of all potential sources of risk in their operations and place controls at specific steps to neutralize each hazard. Beginning in the early 1990s, HACCP-style risk management controls were formalized and US legislation began to mandate their use. Over the next decade HACCP models were adopted across global supply chains and incorporated into EU food law as part of the multinational response to BSE . In 1997, the Codex Alimentarius Commission, a joint body of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Health Organization, adopted HACCP into its international collection of food production standards for the protection of consumer health and the regulation of international food trade .
Given heightened awareness of risks throughout the food supply chain, food safety risk management across the industrialized nations has moved from testing the safety of final products on the retail shelf or the consumer’s table to monitoring the riskiness of field level agricultural production methods . Even in this heightened climate of food safety attention, some threats evaded early notice. The high-profile food safety failures of the 1980s had come primarily from the meat and poultry industries, focusing early regulatory responses on both sides of the Atlantic on livestock supply chains. Although botulism and other foodborne illness outbreaks had been seen in canned and preserved vegetable products in the US and elsewhere, outbreaks of animal origin gained more visibility during this time of increased focus on food safety. As a result, vegetable food safety threats largely escaped public attention and regulatory pressure through the late 1990s even as global consciousness of food safety gained momentum. The US Food and Drug Administration’s first public acknowledgement of food safety risks in fresh produce came in 1998 with the FDA “Guide to Minimizing Microbial Food Safety Hazards for Fresh Fruit and Vegetables” and the first EU Regulation establishing general food hygiene law was created in 2002 .In the search for improved food safety assurances in global agricultural value chains, a new balance of power began to develop between regulators and the food retail industry that would transform the food regulatory landscape. Public regulatory responses from due diligence clauses to HACCP requirements represent examples of regulation at a distance, extending traditional public regulation to the realm of enforced self-regulation by private firms . This change in the landscape of food regulation reflected the rising power and centrality of non-state governance mechanisms, creating new architectures of authority in global agri-food chains. Lacking confidence after food scares, consumers sought new ways of ensuring product quality .
Food retailers responded to this “turn” to quality by introducing an array of non-governmental safety and quality assurance schemes designed to exceed the requirements of public regulation in an effort to win back consumer trust . Quality assurance standards soon appeared across the developed nations focusing on topics such as enhanced animal welfare, fair labor practices, food safety, and environmental protection . Private or non-governmental food standards can be divided into three categories based on formation and participation . Individual firm standards are those created by a single private food corporation and intended to apply only to that firm’s products and suppliers, e.g. Tesco’s own-brand ‘Nurture’ program founded in 1992 and required for suppliers of Tesco’s UK retail stores. Collective national standards represent standards developed jointly by multiple private food corporations which are designed to apply across multiple firms or industry sectors, as when the British Retail Consortium formed and created its Food Technical Standard in 1998. Lastly, collective international standards are those formed by geographically diverse coalitions of food firms and designed to apply at an international level to facilitate the movement of foods through global supply chains that cross between many national regulatory settings. The International Featured Standards – Food created in 2003 by a coalition of Dutch, French and Italian Retailers is an example of one such international standard currently followed by agricultural producers in many countries worldwide. Whether individual or collective, national or international, these and other retailer-driven private standards have restructured power relationships within agricultural supply chains in the name of achieving heightened food safety and quality. Officially, private standards such as these depend on voluntary market relationships and do not have the authority to mandate adoption or participation. However, research has shown that voluntary private standards of this sort can become de facto mandatory if they become widely adopted in the market and companies require compliance from producers . Such standards may then be used by both public and private actors as a recognized governance mechanism, comparable in power to public regulation . The ascendance of non-governmental food standards has increased retailers’ control over all stages of food production. By ostensibly guaranteeing the consumer public a higher level of safety or quality than that presumed to be delivered by the background public regulatory process, drying cannabis private food standards assert the authority of food retailers as a legitimate rule-making force within broader food governance. Food retailers in both the UK and US markets now hold a position of regulatory authority and legitimacy within agri-food supply chains . By becoming the architects of the leading food regulations affecting both their own commercial activities and the growing practices of their producer suppliers, retailers have effectively made themselves the gatekeepers of food safety . With industry in control of defining, measuring, and managing food safety risks, government regulators in many parts of the industrialized world have focused more on the administrative task of evaluating industry’s efforts .Regulation of the food system achieved via non-state actors has shown certain benefits over pure public regulation, along with notable drawbacks. Private regulation can address market failures that might otherwise go unregulated by public entities, providing solutions to collective action problems that might persist in food supply chains without intervention . Examples include the establishment of privately-operated organic food certifications in the 1970s in the United States and Europe designed to solve ecological 6 externalities in conventional food production, and fair trade certifications born in the late 1980s7 and early 1990s with the aim of correcting exploitative labor conditions in developing countries exporting commodities for international trade . By offering solutions for these and other market failures, private standards and other forms of self-regulation can enhance the efficiency of supply chain management, reduce transaction costs, standardize industry responses to problems, and reduce liability for both retailers and producers . Instead of competing solely on factors like price or convenience, private quality standards can allow desired public goods such as improved food safety, animal welfare, labor standards, or environmental sustainability to be measured and managed directly within the supply chain, making them into attributes that can fuel retail competition as part of brand and product differentiation.
Private regulation can also be especially helpful for addressing problems that involve transnational trade and globalized supply chains of the sort now commonplace in food production, because they can be much more easily enforced across an extended supply chain. Private regulation can hold to account industry actors who operate across and between outside national boundaries, and might otherwise escape or supersede traditional state regulation . Furthermore, in part because private standards can become effectively mandatory for the producers they apply to because they control market access , they can be powerful vehicles for advancing a desired outcome quickly through a supply chain that crosses through multiple public jurisdictions . However, research suggests that private food standards do not necessarily provide equivalent results compared with traditional public regulation. Examinations of quality assurance schemes in UK agriculture have concluded that private food governance is unlikely to provide the outcomes sought by either consumers or governments , and that many private standards are critically flawed because guiding objectives fail to include adequately broad coverage of environmental threats and because definitions of key metrics and indicators are not clear enough to be well assessed and enforced . Similarly, a recent UK study of private and hybrid environmental standards found that few standards exist which genuinely have the potential to achieve public environmental outcomes . Because goals such as food safety assurance and environmental protection are inherently linked to profit motives, food retailers often create proprietary quality standards as part of corporate branding efforts, wielding them more as tools of market competition rather than as tools of public good . Even when private standards are built by broad coalitions of stakeholders or include independent third party accreditation and auditing mechanisms to increase consumer trust in objectivity, retailers often implement their own proprietary standards as an additional step even after collective standards are put in place . In this marketing space, proprietary private safety and quality standards represent a black-box style of food regulation where decisions are not necessarily openly accountable to the public or subject to robust monitoring and enforcement . Research suggests that food safety and quality controls under these circumstances may function to promote corporate profit and industry dominance rather than to achieve public regulatory goals . In light of the drawbacks of pure non-state regulation and the costs and compliance challenges of pure state regulation, co-regulatory approaches have become common in food safety. Co-regulation in the food system purports to decrease both the high administrative costs of achieving compliance, and the adversarial climate that coercive regulatory tactics can create , and combinations of public and private regulation can achieve better outcomes than either strategy can deliver alone . However, scholars have observed that co-regulation of food supply chains may work most effectively when the motives of the public and private parties involved are aligned, a situation that is far from common in food regulation .