The Politics of Food Labeling and Certification - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 617

along that divide. The debates about regulation of GMO labeling capture this tension.
Disputes about the science of GMOs' health impact has been central to the political
battle over whether labeling should be mandatory in California, highlighting how the
framing of these issues in terms of safety or personal preference is critical in determin-
ing whether regulation is state-mandated (Carter et al. 2012).
Moreover, all but the staunchest libertarians tend to agree that there are ethical issues
beyond those of safety, often in the areas of social or environmental protection, that
carry sufficient collective societal value to warrant state regulation. However, we dis-
agree about which issues have that kind of societal value. The United States has universal
laws prohibiting child labor, but this was not always the case. The idea that society has an
interest in protecting all children from work hazards and freeing them to go to school,
and that that interest is strong enough to warrant state interference in the market, is an
idea that once lacked consensus in the U.S., and similar debates rage today on issues like
environmental degradation, financial regulation, and wage standards. Given that play-
ers on all sides of these debates are invested in their preferred outcome, the framing of
these issues is, to a large extent, the result of a political struggle between actors attempt-
ing to define the issues at stake in the language of safety, personal preference, and collec-
tive good.4
Although an extensive literature on state regulation addresses mandatory standards,
this chapter summarizes a younger literature that focuses on voluntary standards. To
illustrate the complexity of these voluntary initiatives, the chapter highlights one exam-
ple of a voluntary certification standard run by private actors (the Fair Trade label) and
one example of a voluntary certification standard run by the state (the Organic label)
These programs, which rely on politicized consumption in the private sector to fuel reg-
ulation of the food production process, nevertheless have important implications for the
public governance of labor markets, the environment, and human health. Private cer-
tification standards tend to arise when movements and—critically—markets demand
production standards above and beyond the legal standards imposed by governments.
Whether these private certification schemes complement government regulation or act
as substitutes for the state is a question worth reflection, to which I will return at the end
of this chapter.
Some proponents have lauded the voluntary nature of these certification schemes.
Citizens and interest groups hold diverse views about how stringently labor and envi-
ronmental practices should be regulated. Laws and regulatory policies passed by gov-
ernments reflect a compromise among these views, which inevitably leaves some
citizens' demand for higher standards unmet. One advantage of voluntary regulation
is that those citizens who support stricter standards can choose to contribute resources
toward that outcome, while those who prefer more lenient regulation are not coerced
into doing so.5 The same logic holds if these initiatives are understood as “self-taxing
schemes” for conscientious consumers (Arnold, Plastina, and Ball 2006). These schemes
can be seen as a private, voluntary parallel to public taxation, whether they take the form
of voluntary redistribution of income from consumers in rich countries to poor farm-
ers, or the form of funding for public goods like environmental preservation. In either