EVENT REPORT Breaking the (supply) Chain: Can the law make our food more sustainable?
How much do we know about what we’re eating, and should we rely on the law to ensure our food is sustainable and safe?
This webinar, part of our occasional Food for Thought series, on Thursday 13th June brought together three experts on the regulation of food production and supply:
Joyce Brandão, Department of Geography, Conservation Research Institute, University of Cambridge,
Prof Tony Heron, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of York
and Dr Jellie Molino, Research By-Fellow, Hughes Hall, University of Cambridge,
who with our excellent chair, Dr Rob Doubleday, Executive Director at Centre for Science and Policy, University of Cambridge, discussed the impact national and international law, and other forms of regulation have on the supply of sustainable, safe and nutritious food to the world's population.
Click here to view a video of this event.
Professor Heron provided a concise introductory overview of the topic. He prefaced his talk by pointing out that although food is safer than it has ever been, our awareness of some of the dark sides of the food system has grown significantly, especially in richer countries. These anxieties are connected to the twin processes of the internationalization of supply chains and the industrialization of food manufacture.
Our perception of how the food on our plates is produced and supplied is sometimes quite far from the reality. For example, Professor Heron pointed out that although we might avoid eating products containing soy due to concerns about deforestation, we in fact consume a lot of soy indirectly because the animals we eat consume soy-based feeds.
In a world where the consumer is supposedly king, what the consumer doesn’t know (and so doesn’t care about) can conveniently fall outside the purview of legislation.
International law is primarily designed to protect free trade, so that, for example, it is hard to discriminate on the basis of how something is produced. This means that although individual nations might want to ban the import of soy-fed, chlorine-washed chicken in favour of poultry that’s organic, corn-fed, of Protected Designation of Origin, in practice international law might make that difficult.
Another form of regulation are the voluntary arrangements that producers and retailers enter into. Joyce Brandao talked about the voluntary environmental commitments that some in the agricultural supply chain have made in the last 20 years, focusing on the strict voluntary zero deforestation commitment (Soy Moratorium) that soy suppliers signed in 2006. This combination of strict private policy and national political will on pro-environmental policies has been effective in reducing deforestation in the Amazon, but has led to an increase in other environmentally important areas of Brazil, such as the Cerrado, a highly biodiverse ecosystem, becoming the expansion frontier for farmers.
Joyce Brandao pointed out that environmental policies are a function of public opinion. In Brazil this has led to the protection of forests, rather than environments like the Cerrado.
Dr Jellie Mollino gave a fascinating example from the Philippines, of how national legislature protected the Taal Volcano Protected Landscape (TVPL) and preserved Lake Taal's biodiversity by working with the Lake’s fish farmers and local municipalities. In this case the perception that fish farming was irredeemably harmful and should be abolished, was changed, through all sides involved gaining a better understanding of what was possible to preserve both livelihoods and the environment and agreeing to cooperate.
As Dr Doubleday concluded, this is a very complex area involving multiple actors and motivations, so the kind of interdisciplinary study in which our speakers are involved is essential to the understanding of the complex interaction of public opinion, politics, company power, markets and finance that shape our food system.