How Is Food Political? Market, State, and Knowledge - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 23

retail). Why did it occur so quickly? Several factors explain it . . . especially where cre-
dence goods like food safety are involved.
The most power of institutionalized ideas of safety at the frontier of production tech-
nology comes from the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety for regulating movement of
biotechnology crops across national boundaries. By framing agricultural biotechnology
as a matter of biosafety under an environmental treaty (Convention on Biodiversity),
different political forces were empowered at the national level. Only by this institution-
alized framing could ministers of environment have a stronger role than ministers of
agriculture or health on matters of crop technology and food safety. That authoritative
framing resulted from mobilization around an idea of special risk of some forms of plant
breeding over others—a risk so far unconfirmed in scientific studies but pervasive in
law, trade, and politics.54
Ethical reasoning, as suggested in the introduction to this section, is the most famil-
iar and often powerful overt source of food politics, whether or not institutionalized.
The ethics confronting social injustice, for example, may drive intervention in market
distribution of food, for example in effective political demands for food subsidies for
the poor—more powerful in some countries than others (Kotwal and Ramaswami,
this volume). Ethical intent does not, however, invariably lead to ethical outcomes—a
veil of knowledge intervenes. Interventions in food trade driven by ethically defensible
political preferences, for example, often prove to be both “inefficient and inequitable,” as
explained by Kym Anderson's contribution to this volume. Subsidies to biofuel produc-
tion show the same skew: Representation of farmers in the United States as worthy of
public assistance reinforces the case for state spending that is neither equitable nor envi-
ronmentally sound, as David Pimentel and Michael Burgess develop in their contribu-
tion to this volume. David Sahn's chapter in this volume questions whether the ethically
plausible impulse to concentrate on food per se for combating malnutrition is the wisest
policy for aiding infants and children in poor places.
Ethical preferences often fail to change state policy, but may remain consequential
in individual efforts to effect change through markets (Johnston and MacKendrick,
this volume). Ethical political consumerism, however, is fundamentally dependent
on knowledge. Labels available to consumers are predominately provided by nonstate
actors about whom little is verifiably known. Emily Clough points out in her chapter
that there is considerable difficulty in knowing what reality labels reflect, or who actu-
ally benefits from normatively valued claims:
There is also substantial debate about whether retailers capture too large a portion
of the premium charged to consumers. Some point out that when retailers mark up
ethically labeled food products, they often keep a large percentage of that margin for
themselves, and the consumers are none the wiser. In one case, a retailer was criti-
cized when it was found that 90% of the premium they charged for a cup of Fair
Trade coffee went to the retailer, while only 10% was passed along to farmers.
Whether ethical preferences drive only individual behavior or institutionalize pref-
erences through state regulation, ethical reasoning depends fundamentally on settled