Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Each of these social controls is responsive to changes in the cultural
context. For example, an outbreak of illnesses caused by a particular
food product draws national media attention, alarms the public, causes
retailer and consumer avoidance of the product, and subsequently leads
to recall of the product from the marketplace, lawsuits by victims seek-
ing compensation, investigations and interventions by regulators, and
congressional hearings that can lead to new legal requirements for food
safety. This chain of events causes economic and reputational loss to the
product manufacturer, widespread criticism of the company and its reg-
ulators, and lawsuits.
As a result, each of the three systems of social control is impacted
and will likely be adapted accordingly. The rational manufacturer and
its trade association will take steps to improve self-regulatory practices
to prevent future loss-causing incidents of a similar nature, restore pub-
lic trust, and demonstrate that new laws and regulation are unnecessary.
Under public scrutiny and pressure, the regulator will be invigorated and
do more vigilant oversight and may enact new rules to restore public
trust, and judges may adapt common law liability doctrines to do “com-
pensatory justice.”
This scenario briefly indicates how the social controls involved in gov-
erning food safety typically respond and function in the United States
when a conventional food product causes an outbreak of food poison-
ing. The Starlink Corn episode, discussed later in this chapter, indicates
that a similar scenario will arise when a GM crop or food is implicated,
even if the harm is limited to economic loss from actual or suspected GM
contamination of conventional food and there is no evidence of harm to
human health.
The governance system is also affected by political and economic
forces. For example, the deregulation movement launched by the
Reagan administration in the 1980s, and the “new federalist” movement
that favors shifting governance responsibilities from the federal level to
the fifty states, have gained political support and reduced the role of fed-
eral regulation as a social control over many industrial and commercial
