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State of British food policy

Tim Lang

Food policy is an area of public discourse which has long historic roots. Today it still manages to surprise and charm us with its capacity to grow and flower in interesting ways. Who, back in the days when this Journal was founded, could have predicted that food issues would by the end of the 20th century rock governments and knock billions off the share value of giant corporations (Monsanto over genetically modified foods)? Or that farmers (especially large ones) would be paid handsomely not to produce (the 'set-aside scheme')? Or that some diet-related diseases (BSE, salmonella, E coli) could shake public confidence in food supply while an annual premature slaughter occurred due to other diet-related diseases (coronary heart disease, some cancers)? And that the latter would be accepted as normal? Or that amidst unparalleled abundance there should be a debate about whether or not food 'deserts' existed where food supply was limited (Social Exclusion Unit, 1999)? Or that the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF), famed for its intimate working relationship with industry, should be broken up by a Labour government whose track record over the last half century has been to be quite soft on farming (the splitting of MAFF into a new Food Standards Agency)? Welcome to the world of food policy.

In any review of recent UK food policy, this feature - its unpredictability, its capacity to surprise and shake the state and companies alike - has to feature. And it was this that the incoming Labour government in 1997 set out to address. Labour's 1997 election manifesto made just two food-specific electoral promises. The first was to reform MAFF by setting up a Food Standards Agency (FSA). The second was to reform the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).

That these commitments were even included owed a considerable amount to campaigns in and outside the Labour Party, the former from the new food and public health movement and the latter from an alliance of environmentalists and economists (Lang, 1996: 238-260). 'Old' Labour's reflex was to be sympathetic to farming, a position dating back to the Atlee government which had introduced the highly significant Agriculture Act in 1947. This had set the framework for agricultural support for the next half century. Yet now, here was a Labour Party in opposition promising to pare support. A big change.

As for the promise to set up an agency, it would have been surprising had Labour not promised something like this. From the beginnings of the food scandals in the mid 1980s, it had learned to embarrass the Conservatives for the poor state of food governance. But more surprising was the fact that even a few months before the election, all that Labour had by way of detail on this seminal restructuring of government was two press releases, amounting to a total of four pages. This state of affairs existed despite considerable outside pressure (including from this author) to clarify its plans (e.g. Lang et al., 1996). The lack of detailed thinking dawned on Labour when only a few months from the election, an awful mess was exposed by the Wishaw E.coli 0157 case in February 1997 (The Pennington Group, 1997). This showed that regulatory incompetence when accompanied by appalling standards of hygiene in a butcher (who was also running a meat factory in his shop) could create not just a lethal cocktail in the form of consumer deaths, but even more dreadfully, a lethal political question for governments. Hurriedly, the then leader of the opposition asked Professor Phil James, then of the Rowett Research Institute, to draft a plan for the Agency by May 2. It was done (James, 1997). But one wonders why it took a crisis to get the wheels of change moving.

Three years into the Blair government, it is legitimate to ask, firstly, whether its two electoral promises were really enough and, secondly, whether the changes undertaken will be sufficient to warrant a claim that its commitments made any difference. On the latter point, the record of Labour has been good. The government can happily tick the two boxes marked 'promises'. The point is: will they make any difference? The FSA starts as an autonomous body on April 1, 2000. And, despite deviations, Labour has consistently supported CAP reform. But that is as far as it goes. In truth, most of the pressure for change in CAP emerges from outside pressures, notably the Agreement on Agriculture of the 1994 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), and from internal economic pressures such as enlargement and the continued supremacy of neo-liberal economic orthodoxy. Labour's CAP commitment, in other words, was swimming with the tide. Which is why its approach could now get it into trouble, because the tide is turning.

After the GM debacle and the failure to revise GATT at Seattle in December 1999, the public mood in Europe is not so much anti-agriculture as against its intensification. The European Commission, for instance, has begun to flex its muscles in relation to the USA, the undisputed world food power of the second half of the 20th century. The EC has dug its heels in over issues such as hormone residues in beef and over GM foods. The EU has also fiercely resisted the dictates of the neo-liberal farm reform agenda, represented by a USA-Cairns Group axis of free trading, exporting countries. The UK government's thinking is more in tune with that group than with its EU partners but it is bound to the latter by the Treaty of Rome. Although the Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) of the GATT 1994 Marrakech demands that reform continue until 2002 - and at the time of writing that process is back on track - the Labour government now know that, for all its promises, the political realities of CAP reform are highly complex. Whatever the reform agenda, change within the EU requires immense diplomacy and the long view. In the short term, therefore, Labour's electoral promise signalled an ideological change rather than real change, a difference pig, poultry and hill farmers know only too well. It is they who are bearing the brunt of the change, with collapsed profits and returns.

The creation of the FSA has not been uncomplicated either. Within months of the 1997 election, campaigners began to suspect some back-sliding. Smoke signals implied that the FSA would not happen quickly. Why, if not to get quick change, had Prof James been asked to submit his blueprint to Tony Blair by May 1, 1997? And why had the new government distributed the James report asking for speedy responses, and then published within 8 months a White Paper (MAFF, 1998)? Yet in 1998, the trail went cold. There were whispers about large food manufacturing interests putting pressure on Ministers to go slow on a food agency. This was hotly denied but an atmosphere of some distrust emerged. Two points were at issue. When would the agency happen? And how narrow would its remit be? Would it focus mostly on microbiological safety or would it be allowed to become a fully fledged public health agency? Whether nutrition would be included in the FSA's remit quickly became a litmus test for the critics of MAFF. They had long pointed to MAFF's notorious vulnerability to succumb to what, in public policy, is often called 'regulatory capture' (Bernstein, 1955). This is when an agency set to regulate an industrial sector becomes subordinated to the firms in that sector.

Undoubtedly there was a considerable tussle within and without government over the Agency. Yet by the end of 1998, a Bill was published. In early 1999, a Select Committee (unusually drawn from two others, Agriculture and Health) completed a fast inquiry into what the Agency would do. And the Bill became law by late 1999. The Agency was unstoppable. So far so good then on the two electoral promises. But just as Seattle signified the change coming in world affairs, so with delicious irony did change emerge for the FSA. On January 12, 2000 just as the Department of Health announced the FSA's chief executive (an insider, acting head of the embryonic FSA), Chair (Sir John Krebs a zoologist from Oxford) and Deputy Chair (Suzi Leather, a former consumer activist - a popular and good choice), the European Commission published a White Paper on Food Safety. This completely alters the context in which the FSA will operate because it announced the setting up of a new powerful European Food Authority (EFA) by 2002 (CEC, 2000). With eight EU member states now having or setting up national food agencies in wake of crises (most recently Belgium after its dioxin scandal), a new fault-line in food policy is emerging. Why have a national agency if the EFA is more powerful? Or why have the EFA if member states have them? Whatever their final powers and influence, the EFA and FSA will have to accommodate themselves to the real power, the World Trade Organisation, which through the GATT Sanitary and Phytosanitary Standards (SPS) agreement accords primacy in world standards to Codex Alimentarius Commission. Thus a new multi-dimensionality of food institutions has been born!

This rapid emergence of new institutions and systems for controlling food symbolises the challenge that Labour needs to address. If not handled right, the restructuring caused by Europeanisation and globalisation could repeat the damage food policy caused the Conservatives. There were signs that this could be the case when the Prime Minister, notoriously well advised by focus groups and polls, ignored them all and criticised the public in 1999 for its hostility to GM foods.

A fundamental problem is that Labour still does not recognise that it has a food policy in the first place. For all its rhetoric of modernisation, Labour is still locked in a legacy from the past and will not set appropriate, potentially popular goals. Despite the talk of 'joined up' government, its reflex is to deal with food in a fragmented manner. Only under pressure as over GM foods does it attempt coherence. Although there was a whiff of defensive PR, in fact a Ministerial group had been co-ordinating government positions on GM for some time. Tensions emerged, for instance between priority being given to environmental protection and to trade but the fact of the Ministerial group was hopeful. It needs to be generalised across food.

This is not likely without outside pressure because the government still subscribes to the belief that the food economy is best left to market forces when there is ample evidence in its own party history, let alone world experience of food governance, that food supply and food security cannot be left to commerce. There are famines and malnutrition despite ample food supply. The problem, crudely, is maldistribution, in other words, market failure. There are signs at the margins rather than in the heartlands of the government that this fact could be recognised. Through the Social Exclusion Unit, it set up Policy Action Team 13 on Access to Shops, which made some useful proposals (SEU, 1999) but was criticised for not confronting retail power. Coincidentally, the Competition Commission instituted an Inquiry into Supermarket Power, rhetorically strengthened by the charge that supermarkets exemplified 'rip-off Britain', a phrase pushed by Ministers but not corroborated by the Competition Commission and Office of Fair Trading (Competition Commission, 2000). This preparedness to criticise a sector it had hitherto held in great respect was significant (Marsden et al., 1999). Health researchers and food campaigners had long argued that the restructuring of retailing had had an immense impact on people on low income, a point recognised by the Low Income Project Team report for the Department of Health's Nutrition Task Force (Department of Health, 1996). Supermarkets drive out small, local shopping and encourage car use. Health and environmental costs are thus externalised, civic space restructured and lives altered (Raven and Lang, 1995; Harrison et al., 1997: 25-27).

Critics argue that the government is still listening too much to big business and to establishment advice. The new head of the FSA, for instance, comes from the same Oxford department as the Chief Scientist (and the author of the first inquiry into BSE). There had to be much arm-twisting to get a consumer representative onto the FSA Board. Such placement issues are minor, however, compared to the big picture. It is here that Labour is weakest. Its two election commitments were not insignificant and generally welcomed by the food movement. But there is still a considerable reluctance by the government to engage with the big policy agenda. Neo-liberalism with a soft focus masquerades as pragmatism. Labour needs to set up mechanisms that enable it to learn, to debate and set long-term goals. Only then will it win public support. Already industrial voices are privately expressing the view that they too do not understand what the government wants the food sector to do.

Ironically, the Atlee government provided the precedent when, in the ashes of World War ll, it reviewed the century since the 1846 Repeal of the Corn Laws, and decided that two European wars and one Boer war were enough. Tom Williams' 1947 Agriculture Act marked the one truly momentous contribution Labour made to food policy in the 20th century, and what a contribution. The Act signified that reliance on colonies would not longer provide reliable supply (Fenelon, 1952). The existence of mass hunger required the rebuilding of a national food supply base. Labour, of course, gave primary importance to the new welfare system. But in policies such as school meals, it was merely maintaining a direction put in place by the war-time coalition through Butler's 1944 Education Act. The real lesson for today's Labour from the past is that it needs courage to grasp the central issues of power and strategy.

The Blair Labour government has done much that it can be proud of. Standards for school meals are to be set once more, having been abolished under the Conservatives in 1980, to ease an anticipated privatisation of catering services. But the proposed new nutrition standards are weak, as the Commons Education Committee recognised (Education and Employment Committee, 1999). This contretemps between government, nutritionists, food campaigners and educationalists symbolises much that has happened under the new government. Elected on a landslide, with a strong public interest in food, and with overwhelming evidence (including its own) of the need to intervene to protect public health (H.M. Government, 1998), lower inequalities (Acheson, 1998) and promote environmental goods, it has done some things but too often with timidity and lack of flair.

What goals should be aimed for? Public policy broadly should aim for the following:

To ensure security of a sound, health-enhancing, affordable food supply for all;
To protect and promote the environment, public health, consumer rights and social justice;
To promote economic conditions that deliver the above through decent employment throughout the food chain; and
To work at all levels of governance - local, national, regional, global - to create coherence in, and understanding of, the mechanisms that can help deliver the above.

These are simple to state, but harder to ensure.

The future is open

Despite this sober review of current trends, optimism about the future is in order. As ever, the future is open. There are real choices for the food system. The lesson of history is that these choices must be argued over or else opportunities for good governance will be missed or fudged. Table 1 summarises some key dimensions or tendencies which current food policy needs to address. It presents the policy choices in a number of dimensions or tensions. Those on the left hand side of the Table are meant to indicate the current dominant direction in policy. The right hand side is what might be more desirable if the goals of protecting the environment, health, consumer rights and social justice are to be met.

As food power concentrates, in formal economic terms, the costs are being externalised to consumers (in particular women). Whether this transfer is measured in terms of cash, time or more ephemeral goods such as culture or social meaning, it can be agreed that conventional accountancy is currently not checking what it perhaps ought to. 'Globo-food' is replacing local food with barely an indicator to measure the change. In places where people have known nothing else but this modern food culture, the very notion of food is shown to be plastic in its literal sense of malleability. Genetic engineering is the most obvious of these transformations now being witnessed, but there are others. Cooking is another example. In cultures where cooking is gone or absent, cooking is becoming for many the 're-assembly' of pre-made ingredients. Truly, the challenge to link ecology, health and consumers is daunting if people do not know how to feed themselves.

The age old tension in food and public policy between food being a means for democracy and self-expression, on the one hand, and for it being an opportunity for the powerful to exert control looks set to continue. Food policy's capacity to surprise is not likely to diminish.

Table 1: Open futures?: tensions in the food system - CLICK HERE

Source: Lang, 1999

REFERENCES

Acheson, D. (1998), Report of the Independent Inquiry into Inequalities in Health, London: The Stationery Office.

Bernstein, M. H, (1955), Regulating business by independent commission. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Commission of the European Communities (2000), White Paper on Food Safety, Brussels: CEC.

Competition Commission (2000), The Supply of Groceries from Multiple Stores: Monopoly Inquiry issue statement, 31 January 2000, London: Competition Commission.

Department of Health (1996), Low income, food, nutrition and health: strategies for improvement, Report by the Low Income Project Team for the Nutrition Taskforce, London: Department of Health.

Education and Employment Committee (1999), School Meals: The First Report of the Education and Employment Committee, London: The Stationery Office.

Fenelon, K. G. (1952), Britain's Food Supplies, London: Methuen

H M Government (1998), Our Healthier Nation, London: The Stationery Office.

Harrison, M. and Lang, T. (1997), 'Running on empty'. Demos Collection. 12, pp. 25-7.

James, P. (1997), Food Standards Agency: an interim proposal, April 30 (now on MAFF website), London: office of Prof Phil James.

Lang, T. (1996), 'Going public: food campaigns during the 1980s and 1990s' in David Smith, ed. Nutrition Scientists and Nutrition Policy in the 20th Century, pp. 238-260, London: Routledge.

Lang, T. (1999), 'The complexities of globalization: The UK as a case study of tensions within the food system and the challenge to food policy', Agriculture and Human Values, 16, pp. 169-185.

Lang, T., Millstone, E., Raven, H. and Rayner, M. (1996), Modernising UK food Policy: the case for reform of the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, Discussion Paper 1, July, London: Centre for Food Policy.

Marsden T., Flynn, A. and Harrison, M. (1999), Consuming Interests: the social provision of foods, London: Routledge.

Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (1998), The Food Standards - a Force for Change, January, London: MAFF.

The Pennington Group (1997), Report on the circumstances leading to the 1996 outbreak of infection with E.coli 0157in central Scotland, the implications for food safety and the lessons to be learned, April, Edinburgh: The Stationery Office.

Raven, H., Lang, T. (1995), Off our trolleys?: food retailing and the hypermarket economy, London: Institute of Public Policy Research.

Social Exclusion Unit (1999), Improving shopping access, PAT 13/REP2, London: Cabinet Office.

Tim Lang
Centre for Food Policy
Thames Valley University
St Mary's Road
Ealing
London W5 5RF

Tel: 020-8280-5070
Fax: 020-8280-5125
E-mail: tim.lang@tvu.ac.uk