Material power and normative conflict in global and local agrifood governance: The lessons of ‘Golden Rice’ in India

This special section aims to investigate the interaction of global and local forces in shaping agrifood governance. It starts from the recognition that a multitude of actors and norms shape today’s agrifood system. The resulting opaqueness of the systems makes it extremely difficult to understand and explain processes and outcomes of agrifood governance. Given the sustainability challenges facing the agrifood system, improvements in our understanding of what the interaction of global and local actors and norms means on the ground are urgently needed, however. The section, therefore, analyses agrifood governance in India across a selected group of cases. It does so by employing a systematic framework emphasizing the material and ideational dimensions of power and their interaction. The section has chosen India as the setting in which to analyze this interaction due to the crucial role the food demand and supply of this rising power plays in today’s agrifood system. This article provides the special sections’ analytical framework, which uses the interplay of material and ideational dimensions of power as a focal lens. In addition, the article applies this framework to an empirical study of the political conflict around GMO foods in India, specifically the case of ‘Golden Rice’.     

Private voluntary standards in the food system: The perspective of major food retailers in OECD countries

The paper examines the main economic and institutional incentives which have driven major OECD food retailers in their use of private voluntary standards and discusses their growing role in shaping the agri-food system. It is based on interviews with quality and safety directors of major OECD retailers and a brief survey of retailers’ actual buyer practices. Though not all retailers are included, these firms account for over 70% of retail food sales in OECD countries. We find that the growing voice of civil society, changing legal and institutional frameworks, increased market concentration and buying power as well as their integration with financial markets has provided the setting for development of private standards. While food safety and quality standards are seen as key to maintaining and improving reputation as well as against legal liabilities, additional standards such as labour, environmental and animal welfare are also gaining ground as strategies for customer loyalty and market shares. The grass-roots retailer move in the harmonization of food safety standards is seen as an initial step towards a global approach to managing the food system, with harmonization of other standards likely in the future. Given their buyer power, these developments can be viewed as a way of governing the food system and will be important for both OECD and non-OECD food and agricultural sector evolution in the coming years.     

Cross-national adoption of private food quality standards

Retailer initiated food quality standards are important elements to market food and agricultural products. However, farmers’ certification proceeds at an unequal speed worldwide with some countries representing a large number of certified producers and others representing very few, if any. This study aims at analysing the adoption of two private food standards, BRC Food Technical Standard and GlobalGAP, at an aggregated cross-country level using data of 2007. Negative binomial models are applied to quantify the determinants of standards’ spread at an aggregated level. The results of the econometric analysis reveal some (potential) barriers for farms and firms in developing countries to access this type of organisational innovation. Certificates of both standards seem to be issued more likely in countries with established trade relations with Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, home countries of the standards. Furthermore, larger countries and countries with better institutional quality host more certified firms. Finally, a country’s level of economic development displays a clear non-monotonic relationship to the number of certified enterprises. Although no evidence for a general exclusion of developing countries can be found, the main implication of this paper is that third-party certification for export purposes seems to reinforce already existing trade relations, potentially hampering new entrants.     

Regulating Labour Standards via Supply Chains: Combining Public/Private Interventions to Improve Workplace Compliance

Concern over global labour standards has led to a profusion of non‐governmental forms of regulation. Systematic evaluation of these systems has been very limited to date. This article empirically explores an innovative system to regulate labour standards in the US garment industry combining public enforcement power and private monitoring, thereby drawing on different elements of global labour standards systems. We examine the impact of this system over time and in two distinct markets on employer compliance with minimum wage laws and find that these initiatives are associated with substantial reductions in minimum wage violations. The system therefore offers a useful model for international labour standards regulatory systems.     

Global Labour‐Standards Advocacy by European Civil Society Organizations: Trends and Developments

In recent years, developments in intergovernmental organizations and transnational private governance organizations have created new opportunities and constraints for the promotion of global labour‐standards governance by civil society organizations (CSOs). This article describes how European CSOs (including trade union organizations and non‐governmental organizations (NGOs)) respond to these developments. It argues that European civil society is witnessing a threefold shift in priorities of labour‐standards advocacy: from pushing regulatory approaches to organizational capacity building; from corporate responsibility strategies focused on compliance to strategies focused on transparency; and from fair labour standards within the sustainable development agenda to a host of other issues. The overall result is that labour‐standards advocacy in general and private labour governance in particular are receiving less attention from European CSOs.     

Passing the food and agricultural R&D buck? The United States and China

The global geographical balance of food and agricultural R&D spending is shifting, characterized by a declining U.S. share and a rising middle-income-country share, propelled heavily by the rapid rise of spending in China. Based on our newly compiled data, we estimate that China now outspends the United States on both public and private food and agricultural research on a purchasing power parity basis. The public-private orientation of the research has also changed markedly, with the private sector now accounting for around two-thirds of the food and agricultural R&D spending total in both China and the United States. Our estimates indicate that China’s private sector tilts heavily towards post-farm R&D activities, whereas the U.S. private sector is split more evenly between on-farm and post-farm spending. While the intensity of Chinese investment in food and agricultural R&D (relative to agricultural GDP) is beginning to grow, it still lags well behind the food and agricultural R&D investment intensities of the United States and other higher-income Asian countries (e.g., Japan and South Korea). The development regularities we reveal in the longer-run trends are indicative of future R&D investment patterns with potentially profound long-run implications for the size, shape and accessibility of the global stocks of scientific knowledge that underpin food and agricultural sectors worldwide.     

Private agri-food standards: Implications for food policy and the agri-food system

This paper provides a brief introduction to the evolution and nature of private food safety and quality standards, highlighting the resultant impacts on the structure and modus operandi of supply chains for agricultural and food products and the challenges posed for processes of agricultural development. It serves as an introduction to a series of papers that provide a comprehensive overview of the current state of knowledge regarding private food safety and quality standards in both an industrialised and developing country context. In so doing, it aims to provide a catalyst for further research on this rapidly evolving field of inquiry.     

Links among innovation,food system transformation,and technology adoption,with implications for food policy: Overview of a special issue

This overview paper introduces the special issue focused on links among innovation, food system transformation, and technology adoption in all segments of agrifood value chains from inputs to farming to post-harvest segments including logistics, wholesale, processing, and retail. We identify the issues and the gaps in the literature, and then note key points and contributions of the papers in the special issue. We then highlight food policy implications.     

Central American supermarkets’ private standards of quality and safety in procurement of fresh fruits and vegetables

In the context of near-absence of public food safety and quality standards, or the lack of effective implementation of them where they exist, and in order to increase product quality and consistency and differentiate their product from traditional produce retailers, leading supermarket chains in Central America are imposing private standards on their fresh produce suppliers. These are mainly for cosmetic quality, but emerging also are standards for fresh produce safety, in particular for leafy greens and some fruit. They are implementing the private standards at the same time they are cutting costs in order to compete with wetmarkets, via organizational change in the leading chains’ procurement systems (shifting away from use of spot markets and traditional wholesale systems toward centralized purchases and use of implicit contracts and specialized/dedicated wholesalers). They are coupling those changes with some actions to resolve idiosyncratic factor market failures facing farmers such as through provision of technical assistance. The implementation of these private standards of produce safety are good for consumers as they are among the few food safety practices by domestic food industry actors. But the tougher standards are a challenge for producers who need to make significant investments, implying the need for investment assistance and support services by governments. The paper presents field study findings for Costa Rica, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua from 2002 to 2004.     

Private and public milk standards in Argentina and Brazil

This article focuses on the development of public and private standards for milk as an input to the dairy processing sector in Argentina and Brazil. From 1950 to 1990, the dominant trend was the development of public standards for basic safety and hygiene of milk. These induced the incipient modernization of dairy farming, post harvest, and processing technologies, even though implementation of the regulations was only partial. The dairy sectors were liberalized and privatized circa 1990. This spurred the rapid rise of private standards set by large processors over the 1990s and into the 2000s. These standards are much more stringent than public standards, and induced rapid concentration at the processing and farm levels due to stiff investment requirements. In Brazil, private standards were set mainly to drive down costs in the supply chain in order to reduce the consumer prices in the mass commodities market. In Argentina, private standards were used to develop quality differentiation in the product market. In both countries, in the 2000s a debate has emerged on new roles and approaches for public standards.     

Zero tolerance rules in food safety and quality

In this introduction to the special section on zero tolerance rules, we identity examples from the known literature, which focus almost exclusively on deviant behavior. In contrast, we assembled papers that focus on zero tolerance as a characteristic of an increasing number of public and private rules that govern and shape the agrifood system. The contributions to this section illustrate the importance of an interdisciplinary approach for the conceptualization and exploration of zero tolerance rules, as well as an examination of the impact of zero on a range of value chain stakeholders including consumers. A thread running through the articles is that a society’s culture, and the political economy in which it is embedded, matter. Moreover, the authors show that the meaning of “zero” is ambiguous and application of “zero” is problematic at best. Perhaps most important is the argument that absolute safety is simply an illusion.     

Uneven Development,Uneven Response: The Relentless Search for Meaningful Regulation of GVCs

The regulation of employment in global value chains (GVCs) is a story of the interaction of corporation and state in transnational space, where uneven international development has allowed the commodification and exploitation of international labour. Global standards are well articulated by bodies such as the International Labour Organization (ILO) and UN. We know what ‘decent work’ should look like as well as what all workers should enjoy as basic employment and human rights. Yet, internationally, the different mechanisms of private and public regulation fail at the point of implementation and across the world we see no fundamental shift in the condition of labour in terms of its capacity for social or economic upgrading. This article examines the regulatory mechanisms, and outcomes of regulation, of industrial relations in GVCs. It commends a future research agenda to illuminate the interaction between different sources of standards and rules and the complexities of intersecting private and public regulation, in the pursuit of enforceable, meaningful regulation of work and employment in international supply chains.     

The use of scientific knowledge by Spanish agrifood firms

This paper analyses the factors that influence the use of scientific knowledge in patented technology by agrifood firms in Spain. Our particular objective is to identify whether collaboration with universities and technological characteristics of firms are the determining factors in this process. The methodology is supported by non-patent citations (NPCs) as an indicator of the extent to which scientific knowledge is used to support the development of patented technologies in the agrifood sector. The data suggest that scientific citations in patent documents are geographically more concentrated than patents, and that scientific citations are more common for agrifood products and chemical products than for agrifood machinery. Our econometric results show that internal factors related to the characteristics of technologies and firms, along with collaboration with a public research institution, are relevant factors that contribute to explaining the use of scientific knowledge by agrifood firms.     

Public–private partnerships and collective action in high value fruit and vegetable supply chains

Accessing developed country food markets entails meeting stringent food safety requirements. Food retailers impose protocols relating to pesticide residues, field and pack house operations, and traceability. To enable smallholders to remain competitive in such a system, new institutional arrangements are required. In particular, public–private partnerships can play a key role in creating farm to fork linkages that can satisfy market demands for food safety, while retaining smallholders in the supply chain. Furthermore, organized producer groups monitoring their own food safety standards through collective action often become attractive to buyers who are looking for ways to ensure traceability and reduce transaction costs. This paper compares the ways in which small producers of fruits and vegetables in Kenya and India have coped with increased demands for food safety from their main export markets.     

中国民营石油企业发展状况和前景展望

民营石油企业主要集中在中下游,是中国石油市场的重要组成部分,其发展历程反映了中国石油市场的曲折发展和国家政策的变化.无法获取稳定油源一直是民营石油企业发展的瓶颈,而国家政策的调整是影响其兴衰的主要因素.从长期看,由于在资金、技术和管理等方面的不足以及政策环境的制约,民营石油企业未来的发展空间有限.但是,它们具有顽强的生命力,在较长的时期内仍将继续存在并发挥作用,是推进中国石油市场体制改革的重要力量.     

Do markets and trade help or hurt the global food system adapt to climate change?

Rapidly expanding global trade in the past three decades has lifted millions out of people out of poverty. Trade has also reduced manufacturing wages in high income countries and made entire industries uncompetitive in some communities, giving rise to nationalist politics that seek to stop or reverse further trade expansion in the United States and Europe. Given complex and uncertain political support for trade, how might changes in trade policy affect the global food system’s ability to adapt to climate change? Here we argue that we can best understand food security in a changing climate as a double exposure: the exposure of people and processes to both economic and climate-related shocks and stressors. Trade can help us adapt to climate change, or not. If trade restrictions proliferate, double exposure to both a rapidly changing climate and volatile markets will likely jeopardize the food security of millions. A changing climate will present both opportunities and challenges for the global food system, and adapting to its many impacts will affect food availability, food access, food utilization and food security stability for the poorest people across the world. Global trade can continue to play a central role in assuring that global food system adapts to a changing climate. This potential will only be realized, however, if trade is managed in ways that maximize the benefits of broadened access to new markets while minimizing the risks of increased exposure to international competition and market volatility. For regions like Africa, for example, enhanced transportation networks combined with greater national reserves of cash and enhanced social safety nets could reduce the impact of ‘double exposure’ on food security.     

The impacts of value chain upgrading on the export of processed food

Upgrading in global value chains (GVCs) is an important path for developing countries to move along to capture higher benefits. Several qualitative studies of GVCs have identified two main upgrading types: economic (product, process, functional, and inter-sectoral) and social upgrading. The upgrading concept is widespread in productive sectors such as processed food, which has become a key export for developing countries. However, they have confronted multiple product standards required by global buyers. This study uses a case study of Thailand’s processed food exports (TPFEs). Although Thailand is a leading exporter of processed food, the country needs to upgrade in many areas related to production to meet global product standards and requirements. If Thailand fails to comply with global product standards, it will lose its export competitiveness. This study uses a gravity model to evaluate the impact of economic and social upgrading (EUP and SUP) on TPFEs. Our results show that upgrading types are significant in TPFEs, particularly for exports to developed countries. Process upgrading has a negative impact on TPFEs because of increased production costs to comply with product standards. However, process upgrading can lead to increased producers’ and exporters’ knowledge about how to comply with international standards. Consequently, process upgrading exhibits a lagged positive effect on TPFEs.     

Strategic use of private standards to enhance international competitiveness: Vegetable exports from Kenya and elsewhere

The paper examines how European retailers are using private standards for food safety and ‘quality’ as risk management and competitive tools and the strategic responses of leading Kenyan and other developing country supplier/exporters to such standards. Despite measures to harmonize a ‘single market’, the European fresh produce market is very diverse in terms of consumer preferences, structural dynamics and attention to and enforcement of food safety and other standards. Leading Kenyan fresh produce suppliers have re-positioned themselves at the high end, including ‘high care’, segments of the market – precisely those that are most demanding in terms of quality assurance and food safety systems. An array of factors have influenced this strategic positioning, including relatively high international freight costs, the emergence of more effective competition in mainstream product lines, relatively low labor costs for produce preparation, and strong market relationships with selected retail chains. To succeed in this demanding market segment, the industry has had to invest substantially in improved production and procurement systems, upgraded pack house facilities, and quality assurance/food safety management systems.     

Corporate codes of conduct and labour turnover in global apparel supply chains

Research on private regulation of labour issues in global supply chains has focused extensively on whether supplier factories comply with the codes of conduct of global companies. Less is known about how such compliance relates to the preferences and behaviours of workers at export factories. This study analyses a unique dataset of factory audits matched with a survey of worker turnover rates from 622 factories in 28 countries supplying a large global apparel retailer. The results show that violations of the retailer's codes of conduct for suppliers are generally related to turnover, but that workers ‘vote with their feet’ primarily for violations of wages and benefits, relative to violations of other code provisions such as environment protection and safety standards. This ‘means-ends’ decoupling between factory practices and worker preferences implies that global firms need to incorporate the livelihood logic that underlies workers' turnover decisions while implementing their private regulation programmes.     

Modeling heterogeneity in consumer preferences for select food safety attributes in China

Food safety issues often arise from asymmetric information between consumers and suppliers with regards to product-specific attributes. Severe food safety scandals were observed recently in China. These events not only caused direct economic and life losses, but also created distrust in the Chinese food system domestically, as well as internationally. While much attention has focused on the problems plaguing the Chinese government’s food inspection system, little research has been dedicated to analyzing Chinese consumers’ concerns surrounding food safety. In this paper, we measure consumer preferences for select food safety attributes in pork and take food safety risk perceptions into account. Several choice experiment models, including latent class and random parameters logit, are constructed to capture heterogeneity in consumer preferences. Our results suggest that Chinese consumers have the highest willingness-to-pay for a government certification program, followed by third-party certification, a traceability system, and a product-specific information label. The results of this study call for the direct involvement of the Chinese government in the food safety system. A stricter monitoring system will not only improve consumer well-being in the short-run, but also restore consumers’ trust leading to a social welfare increase in the long run.