food safety

More food is traded across borders than ever before. Globally, food retail turns over US$4 trillion in sales each year. Supermarkets accounted for over half (51%) of those sales in 2009, with the top 15 corporations realising 30% of them. Pooled together, the top ten food retailers (Walmart, Carrefour, Metro, Tesco, Schwarz, Kroger, Rewe, Costco, Aldi and Target) raked in $1.1 trillion in 2009, enough to make them the thirteenth-richest "country" in the world. These are the firms shaping today's food safety systems and they wield enormous power in deciding not only where food is produced and where it is sold, but exactly how it is produced and handled.

The steady stream of scandals, outbreaks of disease and regulatory crack-downs that is part and parcel of the industrial food system has made food safety a major global issue. Our growing reliance on corporate food and farming concentrates and amplifies risk in new and unprecedented ways, at scales never seen before, making intervention more necessary than ever to ensure that food does not make people sick. Food safety risks are amplified by industrial-scale food production, processing, and marketing. A small farm producing a tainted product (e.g. salmonella in eggs) will affect only a small number of people. A large farm doing the same will hurt a large number of people, often across borders. Many of the worst food safety problems are generated by bad practices associated with industrial agriculture – heavy use of chemical fertilisers and pesticides, use of antibiotics and other pharmaceutical compounds for non-therapeutic purposes, high stock densities that favour disease outbreak, abuse of animals to raise productivity and lower costs, and bad labour practices.

"Food safety" may sound like it is about protecting people's health or even the environment. The European Union boasts of a food safety system that runs "from farm to fork", a language meant to make consumers feel assured that someone is watching out for them. But what happens these days in the name of "food safety" is not so much about consumers or safety as it is about getting everyone who is involved in food production, preparation, and delivery to conform to a number of "standards" set by supermarkets and the food service industry that are first and foremost about ensuring their profits. Corporate standards are primarily about maximising profits and organising markets, not about food safety. Of course, the food industry gains nothing by killing people or making them seriously ill, but with their dominance over markets and in the absence of regulatory regimes that hold them responsible, corporations can treat food safety incidents as a mere cost of doing business.

The World Trade Organisation's agreements on agriculture and farms tariffs and quotas has meant trade disputes has shifted to what are called "non-tariff" barriers, such as food safety standards. Today, if you want to protect your country's farmers from competition, you can't put a sign at the border saying "We have enough melons, keep out!" But you can put up a sign saying "We only accept melons that are halal, 15-20 cm in diameter, rinsed with potable water and certified to have been grown on farms with their own toilet facilities." Great for Carrefour or Tesco, whose specially contracted suppliers will produce those very melons. But what about small farmers who can't handle all these criteria and the costs of certification that come along with them?

At the end of the day, food safety is about who controls our food.

From here