Working Paper Series
30 1
Governing food-borne risks in France after the mad cow: from contested governance to normalization
法国在疯牛病后的食品风险治理:从竞争性治理到常态化治理
Olivier Borraz
Centre de Sociologie des Organisations, Sciences Po-CNRS
1The Governance and Globalization Working Paper Series is published by Sciences Po with generous support of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Copyright as well as responsibility for arguments developed in this paper remain with the author.
Abstract:
Following a series of crises related to foodstuffs, France undertook in the mid-1990s a reform of food safety regulation. Yet, the paper demonstrates that these crises must be analyzed against a backdrop of transformations in both agriculture and food regulation going back to the 1980s. The reforms, far from introducing any radical break from the past, actually helped reinforce an emerging regime organised around two sets of powerful actors: big farmers in agriculture, major retailers in food. After a period of contested governance (1999-2005) during which a series of conflicts were played out, a process of normalization (2005-present day) was engaged. Ultimately, the authority of the ministry of Agriculture over all food safety issues was reasserted – while the regulation of food safety now rests on an intricate set of relations between public and private actors.
Keywords: agencies; food safety; health safety; public-private regulation; standardization.
Olivier Borraz is a senior CNRS research fellow at the Centre for the Sociology of Organizations (CSO) at Sciences Po, Paris. He teaches and conducts research on risk, particularly in the fields of health and the environment.
He has studied several controversies and crises, decision-making processes in the field of health safety, the implementation and operation of health safety agencies, and more generally policies regarding risk management in the health and environmental sectors. He is currently interested in the factors at play for the emergence or non-emergence of health and environmental risks, as well as the production of knowledge and awareness in the field of risk governance. He is also conducting research on the role of government in preparing for and managing crises.
Recent publications:
In 2008, he published Les politiques du Risque (Presses de Sciences Po) and a new series devoted to public policy (Politiques Publiques, Presses de Sciences Po) with Virginie Guiraudon.
Introduction
The problem of food safety has been on the agenda of the French government since the late 1990s. Prior to that, although an object of regulation since 19052, the topic never reached any prominence, shadowed first by economic and trade objectives before the Second World War (Stanziani 2005) and later by the development of a modern agriculture in the 1950s (Allaire 1988). This situation was best epitomized by the influence of the ministry of Agriculture on the topic during the better part of the 20th century.
The situation changed with the advent of a series of food-related crises between the second half of the 1990s and the mid-2000s. Food safety suddenly became a public problem and the French government, like many of its European counterparts, undertook to reform the regulation of foodstuffs in order to guarantee a higher degree of safety (Besan?on 2010).
Yet, crises “don’t just happen”: there are structural and contextual factors that lead at some point to a rupture in the normal stream of events; and more often than not these factors are endogenous to the organization or the system in crisis (Gilbert 2007). Furthermore, an event (such as an accident or the revelation of scandalous behaviour) does not automatically turn into a crisis, even when it is of some importance. The reverse situation also holds true, i.e. a crisis may result from what appears to be a rather benign event. In the case of BSE (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, more commonly known as “mad cow disease”), for instance, the political, social and economic impacts in both France and the UK were very high, though the figures didn’t compare: 900 cases of BSE in cows vs. 180 000; 23 cases of vCJD in humans vs. 168. In other words, different factors account for the amplification of an initial event into a wider destabilization of boundaries and routines within and between different social fields –which is how a crisis can be defined (Dobry 1999).
Furthermore, we also know gaps exist between the factors that lead to a crisis, and the interpretation given by officials regarding what they consider to be the causes of the crisis (Laroche 2005; Borraz 2008). They will select certain elements and discard others. They will rely on existing solutions to suggest in hindsight possible causal factors. They will proceed to interpret the crisis according to their current stakes and interests, and prevailing trends.
What this implies is that we mustn’t analyze the governance of food safety in France, or anywhere else in Europe for that matter, solely as a response to crises (such as BSE) or controversies (such as the one over genetically modified organisms –GMOs). While these triggered a set of reforms, they were themselves the result of a series of transformations, and furthermore were instrumentalized for larger purposes.
2 Loi sur la répression des fraudes dans la vente des marchandises et des falsifications des denrées alimentaires et des produits agricoles– August 1st 1905.
In other words, the analysis of food safety must start, not with the crises, and the reforms that followed, but with a set of transformations in the general economy and regulatory regime of food production, which triggered or paved the way for a set of crises and reforms. The crises offered the stage for the readjustments already underway to produce their effects. Accordingly, far from introducing a radical break in the evolution of food regulation, the reforms comforted the emerging regime (Borraz et al. 2006). Existing actors reinforced their position (e.g. the ministry of Agriculture) while major retailers and big farmers became dominant players. At the same time, public officials were able to manage their institutional risks (Rothstein et al. 2006), and private actors their reputational risks (Power 2007), during a period of intense pressure.
Regarding the themes of this special issue, this paper has three aims. First, it will suggest that there is a specific French approach to the governance of food safety, which can be characterized as a mix of strong public intervention in agricultural policy and strong private (auto-)regulation in the domain of foodstuffs. Second, both sets of policies came under great pressure starting in the 1980s, leading to a series of changes that provided the basis for the crises: these served as an opportunity for the changes to produce their effects. Third, both regimes witnessed a reinforcement of the most powerful actors, big farmers on the one hand, major retailers on the other, who were both able to profit from a situation of reregulation.
This paper will proceed to: 1) present the transformations that account for the crises and reforms (or their context); 2) present the situation in France following the reforms (1999-2005) as a period of contested governance; 3) suggest that the next period (2005-10) is one of normalization; 4) conclude on the results of 10 years of food safety governance in France in terms of an intricate set of relations between public and private actors and interests.
1. The context for crises and reforms in food safety
As we suggested above, it is difficult to consider food safety as a public problem before the 1990s. The topic was fragmented across two policy fields, agriculture and food; and within the latter, between the supervision of transactions concerning fresh or transformed products, animal products hygiene, and plant safety (Fouilleux 2008). Although all these fields were under the supervision of the ministry of Agriculture, other priorities systematically marginalized the topic of food safety. But starting in the 1980s, both agriculture and food policies underwent important transformations. These led to adaptations in their respective governance, with new players coming in, existing players renegotiating their role and status, and public authorities delegating some prerogatives to private actors.
1.1 The reform of agricultural policies
Agriculture was governed since the late 1950s by a strongly integrated model of co-management uniting State authorities and farmers’ unions (Muller 1984). A model of intensive agriculture was promoted, whose main concern was to strengthen productivity and develop trade according to the goals of the European Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). Initially, the major priority was food security, i.e. the production and provision of food in sufficient quantities for internal consumption. When this was achieved, the goal shifted to exports. This arrangement played a decisive role in the modernisation of French agriculture: productivist methods where introduced, turning agriculture into an intensive industry, receiving massive subsidies from the European commission, and becoming a major contributor to the French trade balance. Although the number of farmers constantly diminished, they retained a strong political influence (Coulomb et al. 1990).
This arrangement came under pressure during the 1980s. The productivist methods employed, and in particular the extensive use of pesticides, were accused of damaging the environment. Several controversies accused farmers of polluting the water, either through the use of pesticides or via animal dejections. Although the agricultural lobby managed to ward off any stringent regulation, the image and reputation of farmers in the public opinion suffered. When in February 1990, the minister of the Environment Brice Lalonde denounced farmers as polluters, he was contributing to a shift in the image of the profession.
During the same period, the CAP came under criticism, with excess production and an accumulation of stocks increasing the level of EU subsidies and creating distortions on international markets. This led to the introduction of quotas in 1984. The more important pressure, though, occurred in the 1990s, with a series of reforms in the CAP. Starting with the MacSharry reform of 1992, followed by the 1999 and 2003 reforms, these modified the rules defining the allocation of financial aid to farmers and undertook to alter their practices in favour of a more environmental-friendly approach (Fouilleux 2000). Without going into too much detail, these reforms had two effects: they publicly displayed the level of aid farmers were receiving, triggering public outrage due to both the amounts received by the biggest farmers and the strong inequalities between these and the smaller farmers; they contributed to the idea that farmers were responsible for the degradation of the environment and needed to transform their practices in order to avoid further destructions.
Finally, on an international level, the Uruguay Round of the GATT (General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs) in 1986 addressed for the first time agricultural production, with the aim of removing all trade barriers and subsidies. With the creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1994, agricultural and food issues gained official recognition (Doussin 2000) and came to be regulated under the
TBT (technical barriers to trade) and SPS (sanitary and phytosanitary measures) agreements, both introducing new constraints for food producers.
These pressures led to a differentiation within the agricultural profession. Whereas the main farmers’ union, the FNSEA (Fédération nationale des syndicats d’exploitants agricoles), had always strived to present the profession as one large family with no diverging interests (Hubscher & Lagrave 1993), differences began to appear. Representatives of the largest producers (mainly cereals) took things into their own hands and negotiated directly with the European commission conditions favourable to them, but not always to the rest of the profession (Fouilleux 2008). Smaller and more marginal farmers’ unions (such as the Confédération paysanne of JoséBové) began to gain a wider audience, advocating for a change in practices, criticizing productivist methods, and taking the lead in the fight against GMOs –against the cereal producers who were in favour of this new technology (Martin 2005; Ansell et al. 2006). By the end of the 1990s, the agricultural profession no longer appeared as one single entity sharing the same interests, but as a sum of different groups with diverging values, interests and strategies.
1.2 The privatisation of foodstuffs regulation
Food policy was for a long time a competence of the ministry of Agriculture. Two departments were more precisely in charge of food safety: the Fraud and the Veterinary Inspectorates. The former dealt with frauds and falsifications with regard to packaged foods, also controlling the implementation of standards and norms by industry and retailers; the latter was concerned with the quality and safety of meat and meat-based products and with the sanitary control of farms and slaughterhouses. Although complementary, these two departments competed with each other. In 1981, following the election of a Socialist president, the Fraud inspectorate was transferred to the ministry of Finance in order to ensure the safety and loyalty of market transactions against any fraudulent behaviour. This move was both destined to weaken the ministry of Agriculture (and the agricultural lobby, traditionally hostile to the Left in France) and demonstrate the new government’s priority given to consumers – following strong consumer movements during the 1970s fighting against the transformation of food products.
In 1983, the French law on consumer safety asserted the principles of product safety for public health and reinforced the control powers of State services3. But it also required that firms implement systems of auto-control: hence, from now on, the government defines objectives or thresholds, and then expects the private sector to adopt the necessary measures to respect these objectives and to ensure they were achieved. This public-private partnership aimed to guarantee the safety of food products through a flexible system adapted to the development of innovations and the free movement of goods. The same strategy later led to the adoption of the European 3Law n°83-660 on consumer safety, July 21 1983.
Council Directive 93/43/CEE of June 14 1993, which fixes general rules of hygiene for food products and requires that firms adopt procedures of auto-control based upon the HACCP (hazard analysis critical control point) method. Following this method, industrials assume the safety of their processes while State field services operate a control of the procedures on a secondary level.
During the same period, a growing emphasis on quality in food products emerged (Valceschini 1995). This led to an official policy of labelling and certification, designed to help certain categories of farmers who were encountering difficulties in terms of outlets for their products and revenues (Sylvander 1995). Hence, quality became an important component of an agricultural policy based on standardisation and certification, as an alternative to industrial farming. With the advent of the common market in 1992, France fought hard to gain recognition by the Commission of these labels and specifications for products threatened by the principles of free movement and mutual recognition.
Yet these labels quickly came to be challenged by other quality signs, amongst which major retailer brands and private labels. Carrefour thus put its brand name on a series of products starting in 1985, before inventing its own private label in 1996. Food production saw a proliferation of norms, labels and signs of quality by which producers, industrials and retailers guaranteed the quality of their products (through its origin, the ingredients or the methods used) and its compliance with public regulation. The content of these norms, labels and signs were approved by the State but in some cases they were simply commercial brands or logos, on which public authorities exercised little control.
More generally, the 1980s and 1990s saw the emergence of two contenders for the control of the food chain: large agrifood industrials on the one hand, turning by the late 1990s into the leading French industrial activity and first exporter of transformed food products; major retailers on the other, covering 75% of the French food market in 1997 and moving on to conquer market shares worldwide. The multiplication of quality signs was but one form taken by their struggle to impose their prices and conditions on one another, along with farmers.
Lastly, the food sector saw the emergence of conflicts, which brings us back to transformations in agricultural policies. With the globalization of market transactions, food became a source of controversy, in particular when governments blocked the entry of foodstuffs on their territory. In this respect, the beef hormone case between Europe and the USA played an important role: following the EU’s decision in 1988 to ban hormone-treated beef, the US and Canada brought the case in front of the WTO in 1996 and won. This was followed by several other cases, some of which fell into the SPS agreement, others not (Young & Holmes 2006). Accordingly, important efforts were put into the definition of international standards in the area of food safety through the Codex Alimentarius and the use of rigorous scientific methods (Noiville 2006), in order to “to minimise the trade distortive effects of food safety standards
and procedures for the resolution of disagreements between countries over the ‘legitimacy’ of standards.” (Henson and Caswell 1999: 598) Hence, the production of standards became a locus of intense negotiations between countries eager to protect the interests of their food producers on the global market. In order to do so, they needed to invest in scientific research and expertise.
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It is in this context of multiple transformations within agricultural and food policies that crises and controversies occurred: namely BSE in 1996 and GMO in 1997, followed by a series of smaller scandals. They revealed dysfunctions or negative externalities within the food chain. But the interpretation given to these events and their amplification into full-blown crises have little to do with these dysfunctions and externalities, and are more related to the changes occurring with the agricultural and food policy sectors on the one hand, a drive by the ministry of Health to reform policymaking in these sectors, on the other. Regarding the changes in food and agriculture, big farmers played the crises to take their distance from the rest of the profession and push forward their own agenda of becoming a distinct economic sector bringing in substantial amounts of income to the French state; meanwhile, major retailers seized the opportunity to reinforce their control of the food chain and impose their conditions on industrials and producers. As for the ministry of Health, it saw an opening in a field from which it had been kept away for many decades: officials from that ministry seized the opportunity to frame food safety within the wider theme of health safety (sécurité sanitaire) and pushed for the creation of independent agencies that would introduce more transparency and independence in the policymaking process. In other words, all three actors played an important role in nurturing and amplifying the crises.
2. The contested governance of food safety in France (1999-2005)
In their analysis of European food safety regulation, Ansell and Vogel suggest that this regime and its transformations from the 1990s on can best be captured through the notion of “contested governance”. Through this they imply that conflict is not just over different policy options, but extends to “the foundational assumptio ns and institutional frameworks through which a policy domain is governed.” (Ansell & Vogel 2006: 11). More precisely, four sets of issues are addressed by the contenders: 1) the basis on which food safety is regulated; 2) who should regulate food safety? 3) where should it be regulated? 4) And how?
In the French case, contested governance develops in three different arenas: the first pits the ministries of Agriculture and Health against each other, and refers to Ansell and Vogel’s first and second question s; the second opposes major retailers, agrifood industrials and food producers, and pertains to the third and fourth questions;
the third implies an opposition between French and EU authorities, and also covers the third and fourth questions.
2.1 The ownership of food safety
Food safety was not the only risk issue on the agenda of French public officials in the 1990s. Other health related scandals and crises (Chernobyl, contaminated blood, or asbestos) suggested the need for a general overhaul of French administration, in order to provide better and sounder knowledge to decision-makers (Tabuteau 2002; Borraz 2008). Accordingly, the July 2 1998 law promoted a new concept of health safety and instated a system to uphold it. The system was composed of three agencies, to which a fourth was later added: an agency in charge of pharmaceuticals (Afssaps: Agence fran?aise de sécurité sanitaire des produits de santé); another responsible for epidemiological surveillance (InVS: Institut de veille sanitaire); a third created ex nihilo to assess the risks of food products (Afssa: Agence fran?aise de sécuritésanitaire des aliments); finally, a fourth agency was created early 2000 to cover environmental health risks, and later on workplace safety (Afsset: Agence fran?aise de sécurité sanitaire de l’environnement et du travail). These agencies were coordinated by a national committee for health safety, composed of the heads of agencies and representatives from different ministries (Health, Agriculture, Finance, and Environment).
In the case of food safety, InVS became responsible for the monitoring of collective food intoxications, the identification of the origin of the contamination, and the information of the competent state services. Afssa was to provide policymakers with the appropriate assessments on all types of food-borne risks. More precisely, its objective was “to ensure food safety, from the production of raw materials right through to distribution to the consumer”. It had three main missions: 1) the assessment of nutritional and health risk for all categories of foodstuff; 2) a research and scientific support function, notably for animal health and diseases of animal origin; 3) specific responsibilities in terms of veterinary medicines. Regarding risk assessment, Afssa could receive referrals from its supervising ministries or consumer associations, or formulate its own self-referrals. Three types of questions could be addressed to the agency. First, Afssa was to be consulted on all food safety draft legislation: laws, decrees, orders and transpositions of European regulation. Second, Afssa was to be asked for recommendations on individual decisions relating to an industrial licence (e.g. new additives or mineral water licences). Third, Afssa could be asked for advice in emergency situations or on general issues.
The agency reported to three ministries: Health, Agriculture, and Finance, which participated in its budget and submitted referrals. But Afssa had no decision-making powers (with the exception of veterinary medicine); nor did it have any monitoring, control or surveillance capacity (again with the exception of veterinary medicine).
Furthermore, it relied for its assessments on data provided either by the state services or industrials. Despite the fact that the agency did not have any police or control powers, it issued opinions, formulated proposals in terms of risk management, and assessed the inspection systems in terms of their efficiency or quality, of their suitability to the objectives being pursued and of their independence. Nonetheless, central government authorities took the final decision, free to follow or not the agency’s recommendations (Besan?on 2010).
In terms of risk management, the three supervising ministries each had their own field services, operating at the local level to proceed with controls and surveillance on different segments of the food chain: the health services (DDASS4) focused essentially on water distribution; the consumer services (DDCCRF5) controlled industrials and retailers; the agricultural services (DDA6and more specifically the DDSV7) covered farms, liveries and slaughterhouses.
In the wake of the BSE crisis in 1996, the three ministries did not react in the same manner. Finance did not undertake any reform, considering it had not failed in any particular way during the crises. The ministry of Health pushed for the creation of health safety agencies that would introduce health concerns in policy fields that hereto served only the interests of French agriculture and industry. Initially, Health with the help of influent members of parliament advocated the creation of a single health safety agency covering all products, and taking over both risk assessment and management functions (as an equivalent to the US Food and Drug Administration). But during discussions in Parliament, and under the pressure of the ministry of Agriculture, the project was reduced in scope: four, instead of one, agencies were created; three of them were limited to risk assessment.
To conform to this new situation, the ministry of Agriculture reorganized both its central and field services (Gimbert 2006). In 1997 the Direction générale de l’alimentation (DGAl) in charge of food production was reformed, and the promotion of economic activities separated from food safety issues: DGAl was now solely in charge of promoting the safety of food products while another department worked to promote the interests of the agricultural community. On the ground level, the veterinarian inspectorates were separated from the field services of the ministry of Agriculture in 2001: the DDSV became a distinct entity, solely in charge of controlling farmers and food producers.
During its first years of existence, the new regime experienced a series of crises: dioxins in chickens and eggs, Coca Cola, listeria in catered food, the embargo on British beef, the ban on sausage casings made from ovine intestines, decisions relative
4 Direction départementale des affaires sanitaires et sociales.
5 Direction départementale de la concurrence, du commerce et de la répression des fraudes.
6Dir ection départementale de l’agriculture.
7Direction départementale des services vétérinaires.
to the use of mill in animal feeding, or the killing of herds in which a case of BSE was identified (Besan?on et al. 2004). These sometimes gave way to intense public controversies with high media coverage, even when the danger was limited. But these crises were an opportunity for the different actors to establish their position within the new regime. Indeed, several were triggered or fuelled by the ministry of Health or Afssa to put pressure on Agriculture and Finance and attempt to introduce health concerns further up the policymaking process against strongly entrenched interests (ibid.). The tensions were particularly noteworthy between the ministries of Health and Agriculture: the first, working closely with the health safety agencies, struggled to gain ownership of food safety; the latter on the contrary resisted what it saw as a loss of prerogatives and influence. The tensions also pitted Afssa against the ministries, in particular Agriculture and Finance: while the agency strove to extend its reach beyond risk assessment to cover parts of risk management, the ministries insisted on the need to maintain a clear boundary between science and politics. More generally, while on the one hand health professionals were introducing a more stringent approach to food safety, based essentially on microbiological or epidemiological norms, regulators on the other continued to work closely with private interests and defended a larger approach to decision-making, taking into consideration alongside health risks, the costs, acceptability and feasibility of the measures.
The first CEO of Afssa personified this period of contested governance. Between 1999 and 2005, Martin Hirsch helped create the agency and took an active role in putting it on the map. This implied taking strong positions on contested issues (downplaying the benefits of GMOs8), rapidly publishing recommendations before ministries had had time to respond (suggesting a ban on ovine intestines used for sausage casing9), forcing some decisions on recalcitrant regulators (advising to maintain the embargo on British beef10), putting new issues on the agenda (nutritional policies and the fight against obesity11), and more generally working closely with the media. Having previously worked as an aid to the minister of Health who set up the agencies, his goal was to promote health concerns against the more economic inclinations of the ministry of Agriculture. Ministers of Agriculture and even at one point the President of the Republic himself (Jacques Chirac, long-time friend of the agricultural lobby) publicly admonished the agency for some of its recommendations, when these clearly went against the interests of farmers or industrials (e.g. the ban on 8A conference organized by Afssa in December 2001 on "OGM and food, can we evaluate the health benefits?” was followed by a report in 2004“OGM et alimentation : peut-on identifier et évaluer des
bénéfices pour la santé?”.
9Avis de l’Afssa sur l’actualisation de la liste des MRS chez les ovins et les caprins, February 14 2001. 10Avis de l’Afssa relatif au projet d’arrêté du 28 octobre 1998 établissant des mesure s particulières applicables à certains produits d’origine bovine expédiés du Royaume-Uni, September 30 1999.
11Afssa, Déclaration commune des représentants des agences nationales de sécurité sanitaire des aliments et des institutions intervenant dans la nu trition des pays membres de l’Union européenne et de la Norvège, Paris, January 13 2004.
intestines in 2001). Evaluation reports by government inspectorates and the parliament, even when they praised the work of the agency, criticized it for not respecting the boundary between risk assessment and management, and for communicating aggressively. The first CEO of Afssa clearly had a political conception of his role that did not match the expectations of the more powerful actors in the field of food production. At the same time, his aggressive behaviour helped establish the agency’s legitimacy and credibility, indirectly rebuilding the consumer’s trust in the food process (Besan?on 2010).
2.2 The contended role of private actors in regulating food safety
With the 1996 BSE and subsequent crises, the quality signs and labels developed by retailers and agrifood industrials during the 1980s evolved and became progressively more demanding than public schemes (Codron et al. 2005). Henceforth, quality referred to the origin of the product but also to its safety. Retailers, quickly followed by agrifood industrials, issued labels for GMO-free products, absence of pesticide residues, or vegetables that had not been grown on land on which sewage sludge had been spread. Often, these measures were not based on any scientific data; rather, suspicion on a given product or its methods of production, liable to frighten consumers, justified taking strong measures. Here, the risk was not so much for human health than for the financial stability of firms and retailers that had suffered important losses following the BSE crisis: it was a question of reputation (Fulponi 2006).
The BSE crisis also gave major retailers the opportunity to enter directly into negotiations with producers of fresh farm products and promote their own brands, “in order to segment their supply chains and develop quality and safety differentiation strategies.” (Codron et al. 2005: 275) Whereas the previous brands concerned solely industrially transformed food products and were designed to put pressure on the giant multinational food corporations with whom retailers were engaged in fierce negotiations, the new brands were worked out with the producers of fresh products, and then certified by the ministry of Agriculture.
More generally, retailers seized the opportunity provided by the crises and the emphasis on food safety to reinforce their control over the production chain, in order to impose price reductions and a more stringent control on food products. Through the use of labels, quality insurance schemes, brands, and other quality signs, retailers exerted pressure on prices but also imposed upon producers their own quality standards and control procedures (audits and quality insurance). Retailers became more and more involved in the choice of production systems through “the imposition of private standards related to production practices: notebook records of production practices, codes of Good Agricultural Practices (GAPs), and farm assurance schemes.” (Codron et al. 2005: 271) Hence, not only did the food safety crises contribute to retailers gaining the upper hand over agrifood industrials, given their capacity to impose a credible representation of consumer needs and expectations; they
also gave them the opportunity to reinforce the conditions imposed on farmers and other producers of fresh products. In this competition for more stringent safety rules, the industrials and farmers had to adapt quickly – and the larger players were more prompt to do so than the smaller.
2.3 A problem of multi-level governance?
Finally, tensions also pitted French and European authorities against each other, in particular over the embargo on British beef. In 1998, the European Scientific Steering Committee (SSC) published its recommendation to lift the embargo imposed in March 1996, on the basis of the technical scheme for exportation (DBES) elaborated by British authorities. The European Commission decided to go ahead and lift the ban12 ; the French Ministry of Agriculture undertook to transpose this decision into national regulation. Afssa, which the public authorities had not seen fit to consult, forced the Ministry to request its advice. On September 30 1999, the committee within Afssa in charge of BSE produced a divergent recommendation from the one issued by the SSC. In particular, it concluded that, even if the British scheme seemed satisfactory on paper, the real issue would be its implementation – and on this point, Afssa lacked data to assess its effectiveness. The SSC had indeed given its advice under the postulate that the measures were effective but did not feel it was its role to assess this effectiveness. Afssa considered that, until proof was available on effective implementation, it was necessary to adopt the precautionary principle since the risk could not be clearly assessed (Setbon 2004). The French government followed the advice and maintained the embargo, thus beginning a conflict with the European Commission. In the fall of 1999, the SSC and Afssa tried to come to an agreement while French and British authorities negotiated further measures. In December, however, Afssa still felt that a risk of infected beef meat being introduced to the continent existed and that, on this basis, the ban should be maintained. Early in 2000, the Commission decided to challenge the decision before the European Court of Justice13. France finally lifted the embargo in October 2002, on the basis of the data collected by British authorities, showing that the risk was now the same in Great Britain and in France.
In this case, not only did French and European scientific experts diverge within their analysis of the existing data, but the French authorities followed Afssa in promoting the precautionary principle, thus setting an immutable standard for decision-making in the field of food safety. (Borraz et al. 2006).
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We have shown that contention was driven by different actors, seizing the opportunity of the crises and controversies to push forward their agenda, and either 12Commission Decision 96/239/EC, OJ 1996 L 78/47.
13See Case C-1/00, Commission v. France [2001] ECR I-09989.
take foot in a policy field from which they have been previously left out, or reinforce their position vis-à-vis other players. The issues concerned the ownership of food safety, the instruments used to govern this new field (Borraz 2007), who should take part in its regulation, and the principles that should be applied. By 2005 the dust began to settle and a new field to emerge.
3. The normalization of food safety (2005-2010)
The change in CEO in 2005 signalled a normalization of food safety regulation. Hereafter, food safety issues were not perceived as extraordinary topics or ill-structured problems that could potentially evolve into a crisis. Instead, they became well-structured problems that fit in existing routines and procedures. Normalization also entailed recognition of Agr iculture’s central role in regulating food safety issues.
This process can be observed on three levels: 1) a move toward evidence-based policymaking; 2) administrative reforms reasserting the role of Agriculture in food safety regulation – and indirectly the influence of large farmers on policymaking; 3) the intricate relations between public and private actors and instruments of food safety regulation.
3.1 Evidence-based food-safety regulation
In 2005, a new CEO was named at the head of Afssa. Contrary to her predecessor, Pascale Briand had more of a scientific profile. She was also much less political in her style and approach, and more respectful of the boundary between science and politics. And indeed, under her direction, Afssa adopted a lower profile, intent on providing policymakers with reliable data, not seeking to put pressure through a rapid publication of recommendations or leaks in the press, careful to produce “sound scientific expertise” abiding by international standards (Besan?on 2010). During this period, Afssa helped set new standards (Afnor standard NF-X 50-110 on quality of expertise14) and adopted a sophisticated quality insurance scheme (based on ISO 9001). Finally, the data used to assess a risk is strictly peer-reviewed and published in established international journals.
These characteristics do not all date from 2005. Since its creation, Afssa pursued three distinct but supplementary strategies: a political strategy, with the intention of seizing opportunities to impose itself in a policy field dominated by powerful administrations and interests; an administrative strategy, seeking to reproduce bureaucratic rules and procedures in order to facilitate coordination with central administrations and be perceived by the control services of the state as a legitimate structure (following a process of institutional isomorphism); a scientific strategy, focused on providing excellent, independent and transparent expertise abiding by international standards. As of 2005, the last two strategies came to dominate the 14Qualité en expertise. Prescriptions générales de compétence pour une expertise.
former. Afssa became engaged in a process of bureaucratisation, whereby on the one hand it was complying with all the administrative rules and procedures of French administration (and in particular the ministry of Finance), and on the other setting up a highly protocolized advice-producing process (Benamouzig and Besan?on 2005). Even though Afssa, like other agencies, stood outside traditional administrations and was expected to be more open, less bothered by red tape, and more reactive, it quickly mimicked a traditional administration under the joint influence of the high civil servants at its head and pressures exerted by the ministry of Finance (ibid.). In a way, the change of CEO in 2005 helped resolve the contradiction between an organization intent on demonstrating its bureaucratic and scientific rigour, yet sometimes taking strong political positions on controversial issues. In 2005, Afssa turned into a highly sophisticated bureaucratic agency producing scientific advice based on international standards, with no intention whatsoever to participate in the political debate.
This evolution in turn led to closer ties between Afssa and its European counterpart, Efsa (European food safety authority); both sharing common principles and methods of risk assessment. Even though some disagreements still pitted Afssa against Efsa on several issues (e.g. GMO), on the whole both agencies worked more and more closely together.
In the normalized regime, the ministry of Agriculture, and more precisely the DGAl, established its ownership on the problem of food safety. It relied on Afssa for data, risk assessments and recommendations, but remained firmly in charge of decision-making, implementation and control. Furthermore, whilst Afssa undertook scientific risk assessments, any socio-economic evaluation of alternative solutions remained within the realm of the ministry. Finally, a communication code was established between the ministries of Health, Agriculture, and Finance, in case of an alert, in order to avoid divergent messages amplified by the media (Besan?on et al. 2004).
During this period, the ministry of Agriculture still came under pressure on several occasions. In particular, a controversy over the effect of pesticides on bee colonies forced the ministry to transfer its expert commission on toxicology15in charge of assessing pesticides before they were put on the market to Afssa in 200616. This was expected to provide guarantee of greater independence. But the ministry of Agriculture managed to retain its decision-making power. Hence, an independent expert group now evaluates applications for new pesticides and provides decision-makers with a recommendation; but the final say still remains within the ministry. Furthermore, several members of the commission remained in the new 15Commission d'étude de la toxicité des produits antiparasitaires à usage agricole et des produits assimilés, created by Decree n°74-682 of August 1st 1974.
16Decree n°2006-1177 of September 22 2006 instituting an expert committee on Produits phytosanitaires : substances et préparations chimiques.
committee, thus ensuring some continuity with past practices – but also casting doubt on the actual degree of independence of the commission (Jas 2007).
Hence, food safety regulation has regained legitimacy, not so much through a radical transformation of policymaking, than via the creation of an agency providing sound scientific expertise. Authorities will systematically refer to the evidence provided by the experts to justify their decisions, even when in effect other elements partake in the latter. Afssa played a decisive role in bringing back trust in food safety regulation and more generally in food production, even though it did not alter the way decisions are negotiated between the ministry and powerful interests. In 2009, the head of Afssa moved on to become director of the DGAl – while the prior director of the DGAl became head of Efsa –thus confirming the influence of the ministry of Agriculture on all food related issues, but also a convergence between French and European experts and authorities on these issues (again, with some exceptions).
3.2 Administrative reforms and the role of Agriculture in food safety
Another good indicator of normalization and the growing importance of Agriculture on food safety can be found in a series of state reforms undertaken during the 2000s (Cole 2010).
At the national level, a reform of the budgetary process in 200117now divides the budget in a series of programs – with each program attributed to a single ministry that will be held accountable on a set of predefined objectives (Corbet 2010). The program entitled “Safety and health quality of food” (Sécurité et qualité sanitaires de l’alimentation) is under the responsibility of the ministry of Agriculture. This decision definitively gives it the lead on this topic over the ministry of Health.
On the local level, a vast reform of state field services was undertaken in order to merge the multiple services and reinforce the regional level over the departmental level18(Le Lidec 2008). Regarding food safety, the local inspectorates for veterinary services merged with inspectorates in charge of consumer affairs and frauds at the departmental level in a new direction in charge or social cohesion and the protection of the population19; whilst the regional level of state services is now in charge of both the supervision and the promotion of agriculture and covers food, agriculture and forests20. This provides the ministry of Agriculture with yet a stronger position in the supervision of food safety; it also suggests that the separation once established between supervision on the one hand, promotion of agricultural interests on the other 17Loi organique relative aux lois de finances August 1st 2001.
18This reform is a result of a larger reorganization of the French administration, under the general revision of public policies (révision générale des politiques publiques) launched in July 2007, itself a consequence of the budgetary reform of 2001.
19Directions départementales chargées de la cohesion sociale et de la protection des populations.
20Directions régionales de l’alimentation, de l’agriculture et des forêts.
is blurred –at least at the local level –as is the separation between veterinary and fraud inspectorates dating from 1981.
Since 2005, there have been no significant crises or scandals related to foodstuffs. Alerts have been quickly handled. This does not imply that they are better managed, nor that food is safer; rather it suggests that there are fewer incentives in a stabilized regime for actors to take the opportunity of an alert to trigger a controversy and seek to reinforce their position.
In 2010, two distinct events definitely achieved to normalize food safety.
In June, Afssa and Afsset merged to create a new agency in charge of health safety: Anses (Agence nationale de sécurité sanitaire). The new agency is expected to provide scientific data to policymakers on a wide range of issues: food, animal health, environmental safety, occupational safety, and plant safety. It is also expected to uphold principles of “good expertise” and to rely solely on peer-reviewed data, in order to reinforce the policymaking process through stronger evidence base. The merger was justified on budgetary arguments (economies of scale) and with the notion that Anses would be the largest single agency of the sort in Europe. But its creation coincided with criticism addressed to Afsset for taking strong positions on controversial issues, and being more political in its approach to topics such as mobile telephony and high voltage power lines, than simply sticking to the science (Borraz 2011). By merging Afsset with Afssa, the aim was to ensure that risk issues, whatever their nature, would be assessed on the sole basis of sound principles of expertise, and that in no way the agency would intervene in risk management. In other words, it was to comply with a technocratic style of policymaking in which strong scientific evidence introduced upstream in the process would help authorities make the right decisions.
The second event took place in July: a new law on the modernisation of agriculture21established the central role of the ministry of Agriculture on all issues related to food, including nutritional policies that traditionally befell to the ministry of Health.
In a sense, both the merger and the law on the modernisation of agriculture signal the end of food safety as a distinct institutional arrangement: food safety has become an integral part of the larger food regulation regime – itself closely linked to agricultural policy. An optimistic account would consider that food safety is now a key dimension of food regulation, alongside the promotion of French agrifood interests. A more pessimistic account would on the contrary suggest that food safety has slowly been rolled back, once authorities considered that food safety crises and scandals were a thing of the past.
21Loi n° 2010-874 du 27 juillet 2010 de modernisation de l'agriculture et de la pêche.
3.3 The public-private regulation of food safety
An interesting paradox in the French case is that, even though the crises were attributed to the influence of private interests (over health considerations), and even though the state reaffirmed its will and capacity to ensure the protection of the population against any food-borne hazard, the general trend of standardization and delegation to private actors continued and was even reinforced. Indeed, public authorities found in the crises further justifications for delegating more controls to the firms, along with greater accountability in case of non-compliance. The crises also encouraged the extension of safety to farm products, submitted before to very specific and often ineffective regulatory measures. More generally, issues of safety, initially foreign to the trend in standardization, actually served its purpose. These elements thus partake in a common evolution: the management of food safety today is largely run by private actors, relying on standards and labels, under the State’s approval and scrutiny. And the emergence of food safety as an issue has had little impact on this general trend. Furthermore, third-party certification has become a common feature of food safety regulation, and with it “the potential to significantly reshape social, political, and economic relations as it expands the capacity of some actors, while limi ting the capacity of others, to participate in the global agrifood trade.” (Hatanaka et al. 2005: 365)
This evolution is not limited to France. In 2006, the EU began implementing the “hygiene package”22, which reasserts the obligation for firms to implement HACCP and serves as a basis for state supervision. This has strong implications on the work of veterinary inspectors, as these must now negotiate with industrials the contents of their HACCP plan and later base their supervision of documents representing the firm’s activities (rather than direct supervision, as they did in the past). In order to adjust to these new tasks, veterinary services introduced ISO standard 17020 that defines a quality insurance procedure for the supervision of agrifood industrials, which contributes to a recentralization of the system, with the DGAl in a position to oversee all the supervision and determine risk-based priorities for the inspections (Bonnaud & Coppalle 2010).
Altogether, a strong mix of public and private interventions characterizes the regulation of food safety in France. Market incentives are closely linked to public initiatives, making it difficult to draw a clear line between the public and private spheres. But the growing role of private interests does not entail weaker public intervention: on the contrary, they tend to reinforce each other, resulting in a tight set of rules and norms.
22EC Regulation n°852/2004.
Conclusion.
The reform of food safety regulation in France produced three results: 1) it re-established and legitimated a technocratic approach to policymaking; 2) it reinforced the ministry of Agriculture’s hold on all food related issues; 3) it accompanied the process of delegating regulatory tasks to private actors and the increasing influence of major retailers.
In a way, the reforms did not so much improve the general level of safety in the food chain (already very high anyways) than they helped to manage the institutional risks of the ministry of Agriculture and the reputational risks of different actors in the food chain, during a period of deep transformations. The creation of a food safety agency, if it epitomized these changes, actually had a limited impact on the way decisions are made, the weight of professional lobbies, or the self-regulatory powers of private actors. More generally, food safety regulation, after a period of intense learning and innovation, underwent a process of normalization, i.e. its main components were absorbed by the dominant institutional arrangement and made to conform to its interests.
How do these results respond to the questions addressed in this issue?
First, it highlights the central role played by the ministry of Agriculture since the early 20th century on the issue of food safety, linked to the historical weakness of the ministry of Health –not only on the issue of food safety but more generally on all topics related to public health. Furthermore, within the ministry of Agriculture, economic concerns have always dominated: be they initially those of industry and commerce (Stanziani 2005) or later farmers. If the influence of the latter has been heavily researched in France (Muller 1984), the same is not true of the former: yet it might help understand more clearly the intricate links between public and private actors in the regulation of foodstuffs starting in the 1980s, and the slow process of delegation of important implementation and supervisory tasks to private actors that has become a key characteristic of the French food safety system.
Second, the driving forces behind the change witnessed these past decades were both internal and external. They predated the crises and controversies of the 1990s, and put these in a new perspective if we consider the crises not as a starting point for reforms, nor an end result of deeper transformations, but actually a means for actors engaged in these transformations to obtain a stronger position and reinforce their legitimacy. The crises were also an opportunity for other players to come in, in particular from Health, seizing the opportunity of an opening in a destabilized system to push forward their agenda. But the subsequent period demonstrates that in the end, these players were not able to occupy a central position in the regulation of food safety, and instead remained on the margins. This is not to say that they had no influence on decisions, but they failed to radically transform policymaking. For the
most part, those who gained most from the reforms were the leading players who were active during the crises in reinforcing their positions.
Third, the governance of food safety in France reveals a complex and intricate set of relations between public and private actors. This raises two sets of questions. The first has to do with public officials’ claim that they remain in charge of food safety, through the decisions they take, their implementation, control and evaluation. This representation stands in sharp contrast with two key characteristics of food safety: the role played by industrials and third-party certifiers in actually implementing, controlling and even in some cases setting the rules; the limited resources in the hands of the state and its field services to undertake thorough investigations. This decoupling between the state’s claims and the reality of food safety implementation is all the more puzzling since it constitutes a major vulnerability for the entire system, should a new accident occur and reveal the weakness of public intervention in food safety. The second set of question is related and concerns the actual capacity of the state to supervise food safety: the limits of the present situation have been exposed by scholars, either working on France in different policy sectors, or more generally on recourse to third-party certification and delegation to private actors (e.g. in the financial industry, or nuclear industry). In this respect, governance has introduced a greater implication of a variety of actors, but no clear distribution of responsibilities amongst them. As we have shown elsewhere, it maintains the fiction of a system in which the state is in control and sole accountable for the safety of the population; any accident being attributed to individual failure of a civil servant or the corrupt behaviour of a private actor (Rothstein et al. 2011).
Food safety thus illustrates a central element in the identity of the French state following the crises and controversies of the 1990s, in particular in the field of health: its claim to protect the safety of the population against a wide range of hazards (Borraz 2008). The paradox being that there has been very little actual transformation in the promotion of health concerns in a variety of policy fields, be they agriculture, industry, or transport. This illustrates a situation in which the management of institutional risk prevailed (Rothstein et al. 2006).