Resetting the Australian table: Food value chain governance & food safety

19 August 2015

Jane Dixon

Current thinking re food system governance

Food system governance

Governance: giving purpose (guiding/directing) & regulating (restraining/controlling) (Duncan 2015)

‘Play of the game’ (after Williamson 2000; Neilson and Pritchard 2009) or an ongoing and contested negotiation between actors with different resources, including authority over:

Land tenure and use, including bio-security and bio-diversity framings/protocols Commodity chain input-output structures, including food standards (safety, nutrition), supply chain contract relations, marketing standards, finance capital Science and technology Trade in food/surplus disposal/domestic self-sufficiency Culinary culture, including branding of traditional/authentic foods, recipes

Issues for food system governance

1. Nutritional inequalities are based as much in an abundance of calories as they are in under nutrition

2. Competition over dietary diversity set to intensify: limits to growth in agriculture (exhausted agri-

environments, climate change, urban encroachment on food producing habitats)

growth in middle-class markets keen for ‘high status’ protein and imported novel foods

3. A complex and uneven nutrition transition promotes good health and disease, making it difficult to determine global policy prescriptions

Value chain guidance and control

Governments have ceded responsibility for food production, marketing and distribution

Producer coops less common, even fewer consumer coops

The corporatization of whole sectors – meat, fruit and vegetables, grains – lends itself to input-output control by a few actors: ‘Big Food’ or ‘Big Retail’

Retailer regulation - GlobalGap

A consortium of global supermarket chains which have certified 80000 suppliers worldwide

Omni-standards often much higher than national standards

Consumers benefit as do contract suppliers, as long as they can maintain the audit ritual and ever higher benchmarks

Small, uncontracted suppliers may be displaced The Europeanisation of taste and production methods (Bruneri et al. 2010; Reardon et al. 2010)

Value chain control: input-output structure

Value chain control: hegemonic contract model

Science and guiding governance

The calorie “popularized a set of assumptions that allowed

Americans to see food as an instrument of power, and to envisage a ‘world food problem’ amenable to political and scientific interventions” (Cullather 2007:34)

The science of macro nutrients and vitamins followed = Vitamania (see Dixon 2009)

The rising prevalence of diet-related disease exerts a contradictory force: creates tension between governments, agri-food corporations and international regulatory agencies AND provides the same corporations with a new capital accumulation platform: disease-reduction products and services

Government health promotion

Commodity value chain governance or food system values governance?

Play of the game mobilisations in the multilateral sphere

1. Hunger alleviation and free trade [FAO, AoA, WTO] Thirty year repositioning regarding domestic self-sufficiency, international food trade and productivist agriculture

2. The human security intervention [FAO, WHO, UN High Level Task Force] Connecting the Right to Food to political and social stability

3. The public health intervention [FAO, WHO] Connecting the RtF with slow MDG progress on child and maternal mortality, and diet-related morbidity

4. The sustainable development intervention [IFPRI, IAASTD, FAO] Linking rural crisis with the RtF, and since to the SDGs

5. The food sovereignty movement intervention [Committee on Food Security, civil society networks] Connecting 1, 3 and 4 (Pritchard, Dixon et al. in prep)

FAO position

‘It is not enough to produce more. If societies are to flourish in the long term, they must produce sustainably. The past paradigm of input-intensive production cannot meet the challenge. Productivity growth must be achieved through sustainable intensification. That means, inter alia, conserving, protecting and enhancing natural resources and ecosystems, improving the livelihoods and well-being of people and social groups and bolstering their resilience’ (FAO 2014: xiii)

WHO position

….as part of the Post 2015 Development process Health is a precondition for, as well as an indicator and an outcome of progress in sustainable development… ‘In contrast to the current set of health-related MDGs, there is now a greater recognition of the need to focus on means as well as ends: health as a human right; health equity; equality of opportunity; global agreements …that enhance health security; stronger and more resilient health systems…’ (WHO 2012)

Regulatory levers for food and

nutrition security

Dixon 2014

Promote and advocate the following principles

The right to [nutritious] food advances the right to health, and is a fundamental input to national and human development

Access to nutritious food is a key dimension of human security, while human security underpins nutrition security

International and national food policies to address the environmentally unsustainable production and consumption of food

National food sovereignty – in the form of government scrutiny of free trade agreements, land and sea leasing, private equity schemes and foreign investment in food companies, control of food advertising - should take precedence over free trade as administered under current WTO rules

An approach to feeding the world equitably will require major changes at all levels of governance and a reorientation of many international organizations and programmes (Kickbush 2010, p. 25)

Final observations

The SDG process is reinstating a role for nation states in food system governance Countries are grappling with agriculture for export earnings and for dietary diversity self-sufficiency (eg Thailand has Kitchen to the World AND government auspiced self-sufficiency program)

Value chain methodologies and interventions are important but so is reorienting whole food supply-demand relations around dietary diversity (aka nutrition sensitive food systems)

FAO

1945: ‘Freedom from want cannot be achieved without effective collaboration among nations’

1954: ‘Guidelines and Principles of Surplus Disposal’ : wealthy agricultural nations to act with ‘mutual responsibility’ and to take ‘coordinated action’ to coordinate food aid and trade (FAO 1985: 19)

1996: convened World Food Summit (WFS) & Declaration of Rome: ‘We reaffirm that a peaceful, stable and enabling political, social and economic environment is the essential foundation which will enable States to give adequate priority to food security and poverty eradication. Democracy, promotion and protection of all human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the right to development, and the full and equal participation of men and women are essential for achieving sustainable food security for all’ (FAO 1996)

Agreement on Agriculture (AoA)

Post WW 2: agriculture was excluded from the multilateral provisions of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT)

1994: Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) and its enforcement through the World Trade Organization (WTO) – reign in subsidies and barriers to cross national trade

the AoA and WTO legitimized ongoing agricultural subsidies in the global North (Pritchard 2009)

Bi-lateral and multi-lateral free trade agreements pursued in absence of global agreements

Co-evolution of sustainable development and health promotion agendas

1978: The Declaration of Alma Ata with its emphasis on human health as both a resource to a socially and economically productive life and an outcome

1986: The Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion and its referencing of the global responsibility to manage the conservation of natural resources

1987: The Healthy Cities Project, and its emphasis on the physical and social environmental determinants of human functioning

1991: The 3rd World Health Conference on Health Promotion (jointly sponsored by the WHO and UNEP) which developed the Sundsvall Declaration on Supportive Environments for Health

1992: the adoption of the Sundsvall Declaration at the Rio Earth Summit, with the first principle stating: “Human beings are at the centre of concerns for sustainable development. They are entitled to a healthy and productive life in harmony with nature”

Applied to food security in the Swiss Health Promotion Foundation’s Triggering Debate -White Paper: The Food System (Kickbush 2010), auspiced by IHUPE

The right to food

1999: UN Committee on Economic, Social & Cultural Rights which monitors States’ compliance with the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), adopted General Comment No. 12 on the Right to Food: ‘The right to adequate food is realized when every man, woman and child, alone or in community with others, has physical and economic access at all times to adequate food or means for its procurement’.

2000: Appointment of the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food 2004: FAO Council adopted the Voluntary Guidelines to Support the

Progressive Realization of the Right to Adequate Food in the Context of National Food Security

2009: FAO established the Committee on Food Security with support from High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition

Don’t forget regional agreements

ASEAN Integrated Food Security (AIFS) Framework and Strategic Plan of Action on Food Security in the ASEAN Region (SPA-FS)

ASEAN Multi-Sectoral Framework on Climate Change: Agriculture and Forestry Towards Food Security

ASEAN+3 Comprehensive Strategy on Food Security and Bioenergy Development (APTCS-FSBD) Framework and Strategic Plan of Action on Food and Energy Security (SPA-FES)

The food system is based on other social systems

Nutrition and bio-sensitive food systems: Food safety, bio-security, biodiversity

Human security systems: freedom from violence, access to land

Social protection systems: minimum wages, sickness…