Agri-food contestations in rural space: GM in its regulatory context

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Geoforum 39 (2008) 191–203 www.elsevier.com/locate/geoforum

Agri-food contestations in rural space: GM in its regulatory context Terry Marsden School of City and Regional Planning and ESRC Centre for Business Relationships, Accountability, Sustainability and Society (BRASS), CardiV University, Wales, UK Received 4 April 2006; received in revised form 30 October 2006

Abstract Why are genetic technologies necessary in the agri-food sector and why have they created such opposition in the rural domain? The paper attempts to place GM in its contested regulatory context, situated as part of three diVerent and competing paradigms of agri-food and rural development: the agri-industrial, post-productivist and rural development models. Conceptually, it is argued that GM is currently positioned as a relatively new variant and component of the mutating and dominant agri-industrial paradigm. This sets the context and development of GM at a global level. The paper explores in its Wrst part how the spread of GM relates to the maintenance of the unsustainable. Whilst this remains a driving force we see, in the second part, with reference to the unfolding nature of European regulation since 2000, the ways in which this agri-industrial imperative is shaped by particular State actions which blend this agri-industrial model with a wider set of consumer, private sector and environmental concerns. Overall, the EU has managed to translate a global agriindustrial imperative, despite signiWcant external pressure, into a highly regulated ‘post-productionist’ framework in which both private and public interests are given responsibility for delivering consumer rights. This may, or may not allow room for rural sustainable development alternatives to take hold. At least it provides something of an opportunity. © 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Agri-industrialism; Post-productivism; Rural development; European food regulation; Irreversible geographies; Contestation

1. Introduction 1.1. Rival Paradigms of agri-food and the question of GM: some conceptual considerations The onset of GM technologies is creating both integrative and contested eVects in global agri-food chains and its regulatory frameworks.1 This paper explores these with reference to the highly contested paradigms which now char-

acterize agri-food in advanced societies. In particular it is necessary to consider how such technologies are likely to aVect rural development trajectories in diVerent regions. Clearly, their application at farm level is very uneven, with Europe standing out as a region which is resisting such technologies, and much of North America embracing them. This is leading to both regulatory and corporate contestations and competition. However, this in only part of the story of the adoption, despite it being the realm in which

E-mail address: [email protected] For the purposes of this paper I deWne Genetic modiWcation (GM) technologies using the terms of the Convention on Biological Diversity as ‘any technological application that uses biological systems, living organisms, or derivatives thereof, to make or modify products or processes for speciWc use’ (FAO, 2002). This is a broad deWnition covering many of the tools and techniques used in agriculture, food production, and in health care. These include animal husbandry, selective plant breeding for the development of commercially valued traits, vegetative propagation (i.e. cloning of plants). As Kloppenburg points out (1988), it is this technological capacity for intervening with much greater speciWcity at the genetic level by selecting, cutting and splicing genetic material that makes the contemporary period distinctive (see Bridge et al., 2003 for a longer exposition of these distinctive technological features). By 2003 there were, according to Lockie and Salem (2005, p. 155) an estimated 68 million hectares of land sown to GM crops, which was a fortyfold increase over the area planted in 1996, representing 25% of the total cropped area. 1

0016-7185/$ - see front matter © 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2006.11.013

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most academic and NGO debate has focused (Toke, 2004; Levidow, 2005). Of equal profundity is the use of GM techniques in and through supply chains, especially in the input sectors (like animal feed) and the food processing sectors. Both spheres need to be addressed in exploring how such technologies re-enforce the agri-industrial model of agrifood development. The paper explores the current positioning of GM technologies as an integrative part of the agri-industrial regulatory system (Marsden, 2003). It will examine, Wrst, how the agri-industrial model of rural development is currently mutating, and how GM technologies are globally becoming a more integral part of that paradigm. It is argued that this is increasingly connected to a disputed, but nevertheless generally supportive regulatory regime, based, to varying degrees upon neo-liberal principles, on the one hand, but private-interest governance principles and procedures on the other. In this context it is argued that GM provides a new and global technological palliative to the problems of the agri-industrial model; their technologies provide a further basis for capital accumulation, the further appropriation of farming practice, and the integration and internationalization of the corporate agri-food sector (see also Lappe and Bailey, 1999). However, this integrative function of GM is only part of the story. Also, it is important to recognize that the particular application of such technologies has provided and contributed to an uneven but potentially Wrmer and more progressive oppositional base, upon which, potentially, a more sustainable rural development paradigm may be built. Essentially, it is reinforcing the signiWcance – at least among some groups of consumers, producers and environmentalists – of the re-valuation of local and regional embeddedness in agri-food systems (Sonnino and Marsden, 2006; Barham, 2003), and providing a demarcating framework within which oppositional movements and actions can more clearly develop forms of structured coherence. This highlights, what Storper (1997) calls the emergence of complex ‘organisational puzzles’ associated with reXexive collective action and a new geography and economy of qualities and conventions. Whilst the binary divisions between GM or non-GM are often technologically and in a regulatory sense ‘fuzzy’, such a division is reinforcing and energising both the dynamics of the agriindustrial model, on the one hand, and the development of alternative food and farming movements on the other. Thus the deepening and broadening of the application of GM is serving to intensify the divisions and contradictions between rival paradigms, (see also Levidow et al., 2002; and Bijman and Tait, 2002) as well as solidify their internal coherence. 2. Upholding the unsustainability of the agro-industrial model: the global integrative role of GM Despite the onset of environmental, economic and social crises associated with the agri-industrial model of agri-food

and rural development over the past two decades, it is also clear that it continues to rapidly develop and mutate both in and across Northern and Southern regions (Friedmann, 2005; Buttel, 2006). I delineated some of the key features of this paradigm in 2003 (see Table 1).2 It is now recognized by critical scholars that this model is characterized by at least four key features (Morgan et al., 2006). These include: (i) the specialization, monoculture and increasing spatial homogeneity of agricultural production systems: including the devalorisation of farm-based production through the continuance of a persistent ‘cost-price squeeze’ at the farm level (van der Ploeg, 2006); (ii) further intensiWcation of production through the use of external inputs; that is, without external subsidies of chemical, energy and irrigation inputs, large-scale monoculture would be infeasible; (iii) vertical and horizontal concentration of livestock and crops in space, and the geographical separation of crops and livestock production; and not least (iv) an increasing reliance upon both public, but increasingly private, agricultural research systems in order to, as Buttel suggests, uphold the reproduction of unsustainability in agri-industrialism. This reliance on a particular type of technoscience (of which GM forms a signiWcant part) is essential for upholding or, more speciWcally, ‘patching up’ the environmental externalities inherent in the agri-industrial model. So far GM technologies have been highly oriented towards providing palliatives to the technical problems of large-scale capital-intensive producers, such that they can continue to eVectively supply the concentrated downstream sectors with relatively cheap and bulk agricultural inputs. As Buttel (2006, p. 218) argues: ‘Commercial genetic engineering research on agricultural crops has been particularly targeted to solving the technical problems of large-scale monoculture 2 In previous papers and in the book (The Condition of Rural Sustainability, 2003) I argue that agri-food and rural development can be characterised by three overarching and contested regulatory dynamics. These are the agri-industrial model, the post-productivist model and the rural development model. Most subsequent debate in the literature has surrounded the conceptual distinctiveness between the post-productivist and rural development models. There are two important points to make here. These models are seen as real political, economic and scientiWc dynamics which are competing with each other both in regulatory terms and in and through rural spaces, and each have their own modes of thought and scientiWc orthodoxies. Second, the rural development model, I argue, is analytically distinguishable from the post-productivist model especially with regard to its treatment and status of agriculture and agrarian-based rural development. The rural development model attempts through the (often potential) lens of sustainability to re-integrate a re-formulated agriculture as a central but diversiWed part of rural development, whereas post-productivism continues to see agriculture as a progressively marginal activity, and one whose environmental eVects can be contained rather than transformed. In terms of the debates here, I argue that these dynamics assist in contextualising and positioning the global insinuation of GM technologies. In particular, we see, in the second part of the paper, the ways in which the European regulatory system begins to take on post-productivist tendencies with regard to its treatment and regulation of GM. This leaves questions as to whether it also leaves potentialities for the more fragmented and alternative rural development model.

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Table 1 The three competing rural development dynamics The Agro-industrial dynamic

The post-productivist dynamic

The rural development dynamic

Standardised products Capital intensity

Rural space as consumption space The marginalisation of agriculture: declining industry Agriculture’s share of national income falls from 2.9% in 1970 to 1.0% in 1998 Rural land as a development space Social exclusion

Integration Re-embedded food supply chains

Optimum (quantitative level) of production Long/complex supply chains High levels of public funding Continual development of ‘technological Wxes’ Decreasing value of primary produce and production structures

Public sector services The social economy and the use of the natural as an attractor in the counterurbanisation process

Economies of scale Rural space as agricultural space Private-interest regulation (led by retailers)/public interest regulation: crisis management and nature management

New policy support structures Associational designs and networks Revised combinations of nature/value/region and quality Rural development as counter movements Rural livelihoods/Welds of activity/new institutional arrangements Agro-ecological research and development Co-evolving supply chains Revised state/market/civil society/nature relations

Evaluation paradigm for rural sustainability

(for example, corn borer and corn rootworm infestations in continuous corn, the diYculties of weed control in monocultural soybean production). Likewise, in the United States, the vast bulk of research in the applied animal sciences is devoted to ‘solving’ the technical problems of large-scale, vertically integrated CAFO (concentrated animal feeding operations) production. In recent years there have also been enormous public and private investments in enhancing the capacity of huge integrated CAFO livestock producers to control the water and air pollution that is inherent in large-scale conWnement of livestock production’. It is important to recognize then that GM technologies represent a constituent part of the agri-industrial model in that they are used to uphold intensive and large-scale agri-economies and production and supply systems which are inherently unsustainable. They provide resistant plants which can substitute the use of herbicides and pesticides at the same time as continuing to increase intensiWcation and concentration in the sector (potentially reducing labour costs while increasing outputs). For example, in the US we witness the continued growth of highly integrated food processing ‘clusters’ linked to large contract farming (Hendrickson and HeVernan, 2002) in the main livestock and arable sectors. These clusters are increasingly based upon gene technologies in seeds, animal feeds and processing ingredients. Thus GM provides a ‘package’ of technologies which continue to fuel the agri-industrial concentration process at the same time as potentially, for the time being at least, seeming to increase yields and reduce some of the immediate environmental risks of production. Their application in the input (plant and animal feed) and food processing industry is, however, far more profound than in the agricultural production sector. As we shall see below, this is especially the case in the EU, given

national resistance by some regions and member states and potential legal challenges and environmental protests tending to restrict the business cases for introduction by input suppliers or adoption by intensive producers (Agri-Europe, 2006). Nevertheless, the uneven development of GM, both spatially, and in terms of its application in diVerent parts of the food chain, is providing a new scientiWc, environmental and regulatory basis for new rounds of capital accumulation, concentration and transnationalisation of the agri-industrial system. Moreover, it can claim some (shallow) ecological modernizing properties (e.g reducing use of pesticides and herbicides) at the same time as upholding productionism and the continued cost-price squeeze faced by many producers. In addition, it challenges the status of alternatives, and, as we shall see below, places a fresh onus upon national and supra-national regulatory bodies (like the European Food Safety Agency) in providing safety assurances to the consumer through more complex scientiWc deWnitions of what constitutes GM or non-GM food. Hence, and more historically, for the agri-industrial model the insinuation of GM provides new ways of ‘solving’ many crisis tendencies. Theoretically it provides, at least in the short term, a way of bridging the ‘Kautskian agrarian question’. That is, it partly re-solves the problem of connecting the labour and production time disparities inherent in capitalist agricultural development at the same time as Wnding a solution to the problems of allowing the centralisation of production, on the one hand, and the concentration of capital, on the other. Throughout the 20th century, agri-industrialism struggled with how to continue to intensify production and appropriate some farming functions in processing and agriindustry, while at the same time maintaining some sort of social and ecological balance in the agricultural transformation process (Kautsky, 1988; Goodman and Watts, 1997). In the agri-industrial model, the driving force for this

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was corporate capital. Through the increasing application of science, technologies and capital to food processing, farm input and farm Wnance and credit, the land-based sector was to become increasingly dependent upon the upstream (e.g input suppliers) and down stream (food manufacturers and retailers) sectors (Henderson, 1998). Such sectors, in turn, became highly concentrated, while largely leaving the obstacles of natural, spatial and social production to a weakened but still (at least in property terms) independent family farming sector. In this sense the arrival and application of GM signiWcantly transforms and manages nature and production in ways which continue to uphold these signiWcant power relations. Faced with recognizable limits on the extent to which corporate capital and its array of industrial technologies can completely appropriate either the vagaries of landbased production or, indeed, the natural hazards and diseases its localized natures continue to create, GM provides a new array of direct micro-adaptations to the plants and animals themselves (Kloppenburg, 1988). Moreover, it can provide what seem to be ‘more sustainable substitutes’, for example, for intensive pesticide doses, such as methyl bromide in the intensive strawberry production of California (see Morgan et al., 2006), or to herbicides to reduce potato blight in Europe. One of the problems, however, with these new palliatives to the ‘old problems’ of the uneven and inherently risky capitalist penetration of agri-‘culture’, is that they are potentially irreversible both over time (see Adam, 1999) and space (Bridge et al., 2003). Once released the question becomes how, rather than if, they spread. They thus create their own dynamic of resistance and penetration in the management of rural space, and create new regulatory ‘boundary maintenance’ problems both between groups of producers and between groups of consumers. As we shall see, this is creating overriding regulatory problems for the State, as it attempts to manage and demarcate their application both across space and through food supply chains.3 Once established then one question thus becomes how these new technologies are to be managed, demarcated and socially controlled. They play a critical role even beyond their local application in shaping the broader agri-food terrain given that they cascade in various guises up and down food supply chains as well as across various parts of rural space. Rather ironically, for instance, their most vehement resistance can cause, in its wake, the further legitimacy of the carbon-based agri-industrial model. If things remain ‘GM free’ it can protect conventional non-GM agri-indus3

The potential problems of uncontrolled spread of GM varieties is a major area of debate concerning their potential legitimacy. For instance recent cases in the US (see New York Times, August, 2006) ‘Grass created in lab is found in the wild (NYT, Aug 16 2006), continue to raise problems of control and cross-contamination. See also the UK’s Department of Environment, Food and Rural AVairs (DEFRA, 2006), ‘Consultation on proposals for managing the co-existence of GM, conventional and organic crops’ as an example of the regulatory problems which cross-contamination can create.

trialism and thus potentially further restrict real ecological alternatives. One conclusion might be then that in the macro-political and economic/scientiWc context of our three competing agri/rural development models, (agri-industrial, post-productionist and rural development) that each begins to develop its own compromise with GM technologies. As we see, the agri-industrial model begins to rely upon it, as does its supporting neo-liberal and corporatist political structures. The post-productivist model, which is historically much more concerned to build upon its recent ‘successes’ in containing the ‘dirty business’ of agricultural intensiWcation (through such instruments as agri-environmental schemes and a myriad of food safety and hygiene measures), may also endorse it as long as suYcient regulatory and deWnitional boundaries can be established with which to contain and fence it in. As we shall see with regard to the development of EU regulation below, in this context environmental protection and GM technologies are not mutually exclusive. It is only the rural development paradigm which is suYciently threatened in its Xedgling development which is ontologically opposed to their very existence. This model does not accept the continued cost-price conundrum which continues to de-valorise local production systems, and which ‘locks-in’ most producers to a farm concentration and eYciency process. From a rural development standpoint, therefore, it is likely that the steady accommodation and integration of GM as part- and -parcel of the agri-industrial or post-productivist models holds two somewhat contradictory eVects. It continues to threaten real sustainable alternatives, both through the rejuvenated dominance in many agricultural regions of the agri-industrial model and the particular lock-in eVects this holds for many producers (especially in the developing and newly-industrialising regions) (Mulvany, 2005). It will also, however, provide in some places where there develops diVerent coalitions of producers and consumers, an oppositional means and basis for re-creating alternatives through the articulation of rural development, food quality and multi-functional agriculture debates. The rise of these oppositional and alternative networks and coalitions have been identiWed, for instance, in the agri-industrial and neo-liberal contexts of Australia and New Zealand (Lockie and Salem, 2005; Campbell, 2004) with regard to the rising signiWcance of organic production and consumption. They argue (Lockie and Salem, 2005, p. 157): ‘While organic agriculture has long been promoted as an alternative to input-intensive ‘conventional’ farming, widespread opposition to GM foods has seen interest in organic food increase dramatically and its oppositional status considerably enhanced. The organic industry has achieved a privileged place among opponents to genetic engineering due to its ability to identify both: tangible negative consequences for producers and processors, in terms of lost income

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should their products be contaminated with genetically modiWed material; and politically, technologically and Wnancially viable alternatives to GM technology’ (my emphasis). It is in this oppositional and contested context that the second section of the paper attempts to examine. The current challenge and insinuation of GM in Europe represents a contested and contingent regulatory environment in which these three diVerent models of rural development are being played out. In this sense we see the contingent processes of both integration but also of contestation being enacted through an amalgam of State and private interests. Elements of agri-industrialism are represented by external political pressure to adopt GM and by some corporate interests both inside and outside the EU. However, the new regulatory model emerging in Europe more generally with regard to agri-food also holds strong post-productivist and consumer-based concerns for food quality at the same time as attempting to appease corporate interests (Levidow, 2005; Toke, 2004). Food regulation is not only a battleground between these three competing models, it also represents a revised macro-political test case on the abilities of the wider ‘European project’ to protect its citizens and consumers,, on the one hand, but to generate a thriving agrifood and biotechnology sector on the other. In conclusion, the paper reXects on how these emerging contestations are likely to aVect the sustainable rural development model, as a more radical and anti-GM alternative. From the analysis of the European experience we can begin to see how the operation of the supra-state can mollify and mutate the agri-industrial model of rural development. Whether this provides enough leverage and room for manouvre for the real proliferation and diVusion of sustainable rural development alternatives, however, will depend upon the continued contestation operating between the three rural development models; a contestation whose rules and conventions are signiWcantly deWned and re-deWned by the State however powerful corporate interests become. In the European context at least then the other side of the coin of the contested integration of GM might be the growth in real alternatives stimulated by new combinations of consumer and producer consciousness and resistance. 3. The emerging regulatory ensemble in Europe: re-shaping the agri-industrial model During recent years, with the global growth in GM material and trade, the EU has faced a signiWcant challenge in how to balance public, corporate, state and scientiWc interests; not least with respect to global trading regulations promulgated through the WTO. At the same time, and since 2000 the EU, in what we might label as a postBSE/Dioxin phase, has been attempting to erect a new food safety and quality framework which can be seen by European consumers as more legitimate and authoritative.

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Faced with WTO pressure to allow the import of GM materials, the EU has attempted to accommodate selected GM materials at the same time as putting in place sophisticated regulatory controls. This process, following the Food Safety White Paper of 2000, has placed food policy at the heart of the continuing ‘European Project’. A key conundrum here has been how to balance a recent history of public concern and distrust in the agri-industrial system (of which GM has played an increasingly signiWcant part) with a corporate, scientiWc and economic need to foster the increasingly integrated European food industry. This is an industry, notably including corporate retailers, food manufacturers and bio-tech Wrms, which not only contributes a signiWcant proportion of GNP and employment in Europe, but also, given a decade of the workings of the Internal European Market, is increasingly operating in a trans-European context in terms of the Xows of goods and services. As a result, the global challenges which Europe faces from GM provides an interesting window on the initial operation of this new model of food regulation in Europe. As such it also raises some key political-geographical questions concerning the revised role of the State in mediating the new tensions and contestations which exist between corporate, scientiWc and public logics associated with the agri-industrial model; and how the new actions and practices of the State-actions, as we shall see below, which are the result of diVerent relationships between the public, private and consumer spheres – then inXuence new geographies of risk and regulation, consumption and production. This suggests the emergence in Europe of a mediating and more consumer-oriented and more post-productivist state structure. This is one which has gone beyond notions of the neo-liberal ‘hollowing out’ of the State thesis at the European level. Rather, as Richardson (2001), alludes, we begin to witness a more networked, Xuid and hybrid form of State activity. It is one which blends together in a hybrid fashion private and public interests, production and consumption interests, as well as Member State and pan-European sets of concerns. In the same way that public perception of food risks have been changing, so too have the regulatory and accountability approaches of member-state governments, and the corporate food sectors (Levidow et al., 2002). The latter consider their businesses to be at signiWcant risk due to the potential loss of market share as well as from civil liability claims; and the ‘moral panics’ set in train by the media about food risks have been recognised by the private sector as a signiWcant and uncertain risk upon the stability of their consumer markets. The European Commission, increasingly dominated by the need to further integrate policy making, and stimulate economic integration, has also recognised that a fresh and more concerted approach to the regulation of food is critical. Both the private and public sectors then have been pressing for a fresh and more common approach to food regulation, both as a political and an economic imperative. Underlying this imperative have been

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three major changes in the processes of policy making at the EU level (Smith et al., 2004). 3.1. The maturing Europeanisation of member state policies In our earlier work (Marsden et al., 2000), we began to show, through both the design and implementation of European Food Hygiene Directives, how corporate retailerled supply regulation became empowered, and the use of quality control and risk management techniques, such as Hazard and Critical Control Point (HACCP), tended to empower retail-led forms of food regulation. The failure in reducing food risks and the legitimacy concerns since the mid-1990s, and indeed, their diversiWcation and diVerential spatial spread across member states (like Swine Fever in the Netherlands, Dioxins in Belgium) tended to further press the EU to develop wider powers and ambitions. This was articulated in the Food Safety White Paper of 2000, the setting up of the new European Food Safety Authority (EFSA); and the signiWcant transfer of powers and personnel from DG Agriculture to the expanding Health and Consumer Protection Directorate (DG SANCO). These arrangements have led to stronger regulations on member states, and a stronger representation of consumer interests in the policy-making process (see Smith et al., 2004). This is leading to more Xuid food policy-formation, based more upon networks and communities of interest based around speciWc issues and problems of food safety. This reXects three signiWcant trends. First, the gradual marginalisation of farmer-based (corporatist) producer interests in European policy making; second, a stronger belief in the need for European-based enforcement and monitoring of member state procedures, based upon the advocation of a strong and ‘independent’ ‘scientiWc’ approach led by the EFSA; and third, the wider diversity of organisations playing a European role, and seeking to inXuence as well as to articulate diVerent knowledges concerning foods, health and ethical issues (e.g. animal welfare, and other consumerbased groups). 3.2. The growing consumerisation and institutionalisation of European food policy, and the empowerment of a wider range of interest groups The growing political signiWcance of the European Parliament as well as DG SANCO and the newly established risk assessment body, EFSA, has promoted a process of consumerisation of policy-making. This is underlain by a series of tensions and shifting positions associated with production and consumption interests, public policy versus private sector interests; the diVerential authority of the actual communication about risks to the public; and Wnally, competing conceptions about what constitutes sustainable production methods. While becoming increasingly involved in the shaping of new legislation and policy on food, retailers and manufacturers are also keen to demonstrate that the primary

purpose of such policy shifts must be to ensure the eVective workings of the internal market; that is to provide a more cast-iron set of assurances for consumer protection such that their competitive spaces in the markets for food can be maintained and developed. The new institutional process occurring in European food policy then seeks a doubledividend eVect. On the one hand, the response seeks to provide an improved basis for the vast array of competing interests to be consulted and to come together in ways which will make policy-making more inclusive, eVective and implementable. On the other hand, it supposedly provides a more sophisticated ‘science’ and evidence-based communication system for food and health risks aimed at stabilising and re-legitimating European food markets. 3.3. The growing, if contested, legitimacy and authority of a more complex private interest model of food regulation The private-interest model of retailer-led regulation identiWed in earlier analyses (see Marsden et al., 2000; Thankappan et al., 2005), has had to both adjust and Europeanise to these changing and wider regulatory conditions. This has not reduced its signiWcance, but its character has been modiWed in the sense that it now has to sit alongside new public sector agencies and actions, and a stronger reliance upon supposedly independent ‘scientiWc’ mitigation and assessment of food risks. Ironically then the British inXuence in shaping the European food safety agenda has not only been associated with it being the unique source of BSE and FMD. Rather, the now established regulatory practices of its corporate retail sector in policing food chains through arms-length control mechanisms, privatelybased assurance schemes and developing innovative baskets of ‘own-brand’ goods, has led to this being seen as the preferred model at the European level. Issues of traceability, labeling, implementing a ‘pre-cautionary approach’, and the speciWc debates about the regulation of GM products, are all tending to reinforce the private-interest model of food regulation which has been projected and implemented by corporate retailers. The challenge, therefore, now becomes how to dovetail the existing and highly dynamic private interest-model within the newly enhanced public-interest regime that is being established at EU level. This process, now involves a more complex private-interest model which acts to further entrench retailer and commercially-led regulation in and through supply chains at the same time as the public authorities are attempting to further guarantee minimum standards of food safety and quality to communicate risks ‘scientiWcally’, and to take the bulk of the responsibility if and when major food scares re-occur. In this sense the interrelationships between the State, the private sector and the public are rearranged, and their responsibilities are redistributed. This hybrid, public/private model of food regulation has thus emerged out of the ‘politics of uncertainty’ and the food crises of the last two decades (see Richardson, 2001; Majone, 1992). It is important, therefore, to assess

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how is such a model is coping with its largest contemporary challenge; that of GM foods. 4. The onset of GM: the regulatory model in action The year, 2004, marked a new era in the regulation of GM foods in Europe. With the publication of three Regulations, GM is subject to further controversy as industry attempts to comply with new laws (from Spring 2004). Of all the food crisis threats the EU has weathered, perhaps the most profound is that associated with GM foods. Food safety crises such as BSE, salmonella and E-coli were established and proven by science. However, the GM crisis is rooted in public perception of risk and scepticism in science (ESRC, 1999). Consequently GM regulation since the mid 1990s, appears to have been hurriedly drafted, layer upon layer, resulting in a piecemeal network of laws alongside the 2004 reforms that are considered by industry to be impractical, unworkable and unnecessary (Carson and Lee, 2005). 4.1. Beyond the GM moratorium In October, 1998, the EU approved nine agricultural biotech products for planting or import, but then suspended consideration of all new applications. Five member states (France, Germany, Italy, Greece and Luxembourg) have also banned the approved crops. The EU has so far refused to challenge these illegal bans. The US, Argentina and Canada Wled a case at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) against the EU, arguing for the end of the Wve-year moratorium. They argue that this is a trade barrier without scientiWc justiWcation, and as such contravenes WTO rules which state that a ban alleging to protect health and the environment must have scientiWc proof that the products are harmful. The timescale for the challenge is pre-determined by the WTO rules. The European Commission has now been forced to end the moratorium (see Agri-Europe, 2006) and to engage its new regulatory framework. New regulations have thus been put in place which will allow the entrance of GM feed, seeds and foods under diVering types of circumstances. This is following considerable pressure from private sector food and feed Wrms to enter the European market. Up until this point, and since the mid-90s, regulations have been developed in a reactive and largely un-coordinated way, and largely in response to particular interest group concerns. The emerging and more comprehensive process is engaging the new public-private policy-making model outlined above, with the EFSA playing a key risk-assessment role, and DG SANCO looking after risk-management. However, in line with this model, the private and corporate sector has pivotal roles to play, not only in pressing for market entry of GM crops and feeds (primarily through the multi-national feed Wrms) but also in terms of the implementation of the new EU directives and guidelines.

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4.2. A restricted public role? Three new regulations are implemented (since 2004). These concern (i) the regulation on GM food and feed; (ii) traceability and labeling; and (iii) transboundary movement. Foods have to be labeled as genetically modiWed if there is an actual presence of novel DNA/protein. However, highly processed ingredients (such as reWned vegetable oils) produced from a GM source but no longer containing any detectable levels, do not have to be labeled. GM additives and Xavourings are labeled but this is again based upon detectability. Catering outlets also provide GM content information, and there is an obligation upon suppliers to caterers to provide relevant information. There is no current labeling requirement for GM feed or products from animals eating GM feed. The most signiWcant change associated with the food and feed regulation is the expansion of the current labeling regime to include GM food or feed regardless of detectability. Products analytically indistinguishable from conventional equivalents will be labeled as containing GM. However, the regulation is limited to food and feed containing or derived from a GMO. It does not cover food/feed made with a GMO (such as a processing aid or a GM enzyme). The (private sector) supply chain is given the responsibility for full traceability systems to verify its labeling. In practical terms it is likely that the responsibility will be apportioned by contractual warranties and indemnities between businesses possibly with reference to the threshold level for accidental contamination. The traceability and labeling regulation is supposed to lay down a harmonised Community framework for tracing and identifying GMO’s, as well as food products and feed derived from GMO’s at all stages of being placed on the market. In order to trace live GMO’s and derived products (i.e. above de minimus 0.5/0.9 thresholds) food operators will be required to transmit GM information throughout the production and distribution chain. Such a system will rely upon a comprehensive paper-based records system, which could have a signiWcant impact upon small and SME businesses. The new rules provide consumers with more but not complete information on GM in their foods. For instance, the unevenness of the regulations mean that ingredients, additives and Xavourings are now covered under the labeling laws but processing aids and animalderived products (milk, eggs, meat, etc.) are not. Farmers will know if they are using GM derived feeds but they will not be obliged to pass this information on to the Wnal consumer of their products. The reforms mean that Europe will have the strictest and most comprehensive labeling regime in the world. But this will not mean that GM foods and feeds will not pass through this regulatory maze (see Fig. 1). This is, however, undoubtedly going to cause more geo-political conXict with other pro-GM countries and Wrms. Member states will be expected to sign up to the EU programme, and already we

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see the UK, through the Food Standards Agency (FSA) noticeably quickening the pro-GM debate; holding a range of meetings and events to help assess the public’s views on the acceptability of GM foods. The prevailing logic is that some GM foods will be developed on the market and the priority is placed on allowing consumers to eVectively decide for themselves whether they wish to purchase them. The EFSA, now operational, is currently ‘favourable’ to Monsanto GM maize (for import and processing) for example, and a raft of twenty-two applications for the placing on the market of GMO’s have been submitted into the authorisation procedure under Directive 2001/18/EC; including maize, oilseed rape, sugar beet, soy beans, cotton, rice and fodder beet. Eleven of these applications have the scope which is restricted to import and processing, while the remaining ones also include cultivation as a requested use. The UK government agreed in March 2004 the commercialisation of GM maize cultivation, arguing that the approach is ‘precautionary’ and ‘evidence-based’: ‘There was no scientiWc case for a blanket approval for all GM uses and no scientiWc case for a blanket ban on the use of GM’ (Minister of Environment, Food and Rural AVairs (March 2004). Here the national government, in combina-

tion with EU regulations is carefully ushering in GM foods, feeds and crops, but doing so by divesting the responsibility for problems of cross-contamination, or local and regional resistance back to the private sector. The Minister continues: ‘I must make it clear that any such compensation scheme (to organic growers potential Wnancial loss) would need to be funded by the GM sector itself, rather than by government or producers of non-GM crops’ƒ.. and that ‘the government will provide guidance to farmers interested in establishing voluntary GM free-zones in their areas, consistent with EU legislation’. Under the new EU legislation member states can adopt national and regional measures of co-existence; putting the onus and emphasis upon groups of producers to create voluntary agreements. These applications are mounting. In these ways we can see considerable confusion and conXation of the GM issue with regard to feeds, foods and crop commercialisation. What does unify the regulatory approach to these is a reiWed reliance by the Europe and UK upon a more ‘scientiWc’ approach undertaken ‘independently’ by the EFSA and equivalent national agencies (like the FSA in the UK). Meanwhile, the trajectory of development is what we might regard as the regulatory sieve or colander (see Fig. 1). In many ways this is the

Fig. 1. The EU regulatory colander.

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outcome of the new hybrid, public-private regulatory model outlined above. This is a policy process which seeks to give consumer assurances through a more independent and authoritative ‘science-based’ approach, but one which eventually relies upon particular fragmented and unevenly applied regulatory instruments and private sector implementation. It also represents a system of ‘public assurance’ which is sandwiched between private forms of research and development on the one hand, and private interest regulation on the other. It is thus left to the private and NGO sectors to contest the introduction of GM crops. As Toke (2004: p. 209) critically assesses, what passes as authoritative science and risk-management in this context is bound up with the prevailing cultural and political economy: ‘The USA and the EU use diVerent scientiWc standards to evaluate GM food and crops. Much of what is called science in this GM food and crops debate is in fact, culture. The controversial assessments of the risks of using antibiotic resistant marker genes, the issue of whether GMO’s are fundamentally diVerent to conventional crops, or whether we should subject GM food to scientiWc assessment as opposed to just demonstrate their substantial equivalence to conventional food, the issue of what tests we should select to determine the impact on wildlife by GM crops; these are all ‘value’ issues. Much of what passes for science in the debate about GM crops and food is in fact nothing more than a more technical elaboration of dominant and cultural values which act as social truths of the day in a particular country’.

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5.1. New products Regarding the onset of GM products, for instance, the UK Food Standards Agency argued in October 2004 that: ‘it is satisWed that the current safety assessment procedures for GM foods are suYciently robust and rigorous to ensure that approved GM foods are as safe as their non-GM counterparts, and pose no additional risk to the consumer’ (FSA, October 2004). Such an approach matches the new EU stance with regard to the approval of GM sweet corn (in May 2004) which argues: ‘GM sweet corn has been subject to the most rigorous pre-marketing assessment in the world. It has been scientiWcally assessed as being safe as any conventional maize. Food safety is therefore not an issue, it is a question of consumer choice’ (DG SANCO, 2004). This approach tends to confuse the connections between actual food consumption issues and the commercialisation of GM crops. As a result, it is likely to lead to new and highly uneven patterns of GM consumption and production; ones which will have to be regulated and implemented by the private sector. For example, while actual crop commercialisation in the UK was seen as being ‘shelved’ for the ‘foreseeable future’ (by the British Government); with the Wrm Bayer Crop Science blaming government constraints for making it currently ‘economically non-viable’; it is important to recognise that this is not stopping the growing importation of GM products for sale to the EU and UK consumer.

5. Towards the irreversible geographies of GM food regulation?

5.2. Labeling and traceability

The new ‘post-BSE’ EU food regulatory model has been challenged by the onset of GM technologies in profound ways. Its response, illustrated in Fig. 1, has been to accommodate rather than completely resist their insinuation into European food supply chains. In this sense the EU approach has been to combat and translate an essentially agri-industrial model of development through post-productivist means. The emphasis has been on adopting a particular ‘science-based approach’, both at EU and UK levels; an approach which has acted to fragment and fracture GM innovations into diVerent regulatory boxes and instruments (e.g. traceability, co-existence, thresholds, transboundary movements, labeling); at the same time as leaving the (increasingly retailer-led) private sector responsible for implementation and market acceptance. In this sense, the State processes are far from ‘hollowed out’; but they are full of holes; holes through which private forms of regulation are expected to operate and, moreover, be eVective. More speciWcally, this is beginning to shape uneven and contingent geographies of GM in at least three ways: new food products, labeling and animal feed.

The new labeling regulations allow an uneven process of GM signiWcation. If a food contains or consists of GMO’s, or contains ingredients produced from GMO’s, this must be indicated on the label. For GM products sold ‘loose’, information must be displayed immediately next to the food to indicate that it is GM. Products with GM technology (e.g. cheeses produced with GM enzymes, for example) do not have to be labeled, nor do products such as meat, milk and eggs from animals fed on GM animal feed, or small amounts of GM (i.e. below 0.9%). For instance, the enzyme called Chymosin, which is used to make cheese from milk was previously obtained by scraping calves stomachs. It is now produced in a much ‘purer form’ from bacteria that have been altered by GM to produce large amounts of Chymosin from natural sources. Since only the bacteria used to produce the Chymosin, and not the Chymosin itself has been genetically modiWed, then such products do not need to be labeled. The regulation lays down a harmonized community framework for tracing and identifying GMO’s, as well as food products and feed derived from GMOs, at all stages of

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their placing on the market through the production and distribution chains. In order to trace live GMOs and products derived from them private operators are now required to transmit information to the eVect that a product contains, consists of, or is derived from GMO’s. This relies on a paper-based records system which is open to questions of consistency. Such a comprehensive system could have implications of compliance for small and SME businesses. It is the private sector’s responsibility to track down the movement of GM products through the production and distribution chains, while transmitting and keeping information at each stage of placing a product on the market, the records have to be kept for at least 5 years. 5.3. Animal feed and re-managing the supply chain Perhaps more profoundly, the regulations on GM animal feed are allowing an increasing number of ‘marketing consents’ under the EC Directive on the deliberate release into the environment of GMO’s. Six plants with potential use in animal feed have been granted approvals (2004), including maize, soya-bean and oil seed rape-herbicide tolerance and insect resistant varieties. Materials from GM crops are thus widely used in animal feed in the UK. The UK imports 21.3 million tonnes of soya beans and soybean meal from the USA, Canada, Brazil and Argentina (2003), and three-quarters of a million tonnes of maize gluten feed from the USA. Maize and oil seed products form a staple part of animal feeds. These now have to be labeled under the new regulations as they enter the farm gate, but the animal products leaving the farm do not. We see here then the operation or ‘regulatory shaking’ of the EU sieve or colander illustrated in Fig. 1. This is a highly uneven process both in spatial terms, and in terms of producer-consumer and supply chain relations. For instance, feed manufacturers are clearly using GM raw materials, so are farmers; but many major food manufacturers and retailers are still banning these products. Geographically, actual crop commercialisation in the EU is restricted to 50,000 ha of maize in Spain, and a smaller quantity of maize in Germany; yet imports are increasing in Europe with an estimated 25% of all global production of soya maize, cotton and oil seed rape being GM-based. The EU regulatory framework has attempted to construct a legitimising platform for the application and use of GM in European supply chains in a context of considerable public/consumer concern. It has done this by developing a sophisticated public-private model of regulation, whereby the State limits it role in framing regulatory instruments supposedly in the ‘consumers interest’. As long as ‘the consumer’ can be informed both about the risks and of the incidence of GM (e.g. through labeling) the problem can be solved-at least in the short term. It does this more authoritatively now through the development of risk management and assessment approaches and the setting up of bodies like the EFSA and the UK FSA. These become the consumeroriented bodies which are competing for authority with

consumer groups and retailers through both their adherence to an ‘evidence-based’ approach on the one hand, and their public consultation and consumer communication processes on the other. The ‘colander’ is at least more transparent. The implications of this Xuid and hybrid ‘model’ of regulation for GM is that the food industry (including producers) will need to bear signiWcant costs with regard to identifying and tracing GM food lines. This will be a particular problem for the food manufacturing sector rather than the corporate retailing sector. The latter will continue also to compete for the authoritative voice of the consumer, expecting the upstream sectors to deliver clearly deWned products. In this sense, the onset of GM, and all its regulatory instruments will reinforce the existing power relations in food supply chains. In terms of production, this emerging system is likely to be highly spatially uneven, but potentially irreversible if/ once GM crops are granted commercial status. Many regions (such as Wales in the UK, Tuscany in Italy) may resist commercialisation and attempt to create ‘GM free zones’. As we see here this would not necessarily extend to food consumption or to the purchasing of livestock feeds, given the current forms of regulation, however. At a local level, potential co-existence battles between diVerent farmer groups will need to go through the courts. New spatial Wssures then begin to open up between not only GM producers and organic producers, but also GM producers and conventional farmers. This will increase the notion of rural or agrarian space as a type of ‘regulatory battleground’, with diVerent types of producers and consumers seeking to create new boundaries and ‘safe-havens’ around their particular production systems. The continuing story of GM and food regulation in the EU context is one where particular roles for private and public regulation are beginning to emerge. This public-private regulatory system is beginning to re-shape the contingent, but potentially irreversible, geographies of food consumption and production in regions and nation states. The regulatory system however tends to deny notions of ecological and social geographies of rural space; yet it is these embedded geographies that will continue to contingently shape the variable production and consumption relations. The macro-political economy of GM food regulation which has begun to be traced here, therefore, is only one side of the story. More detailed research will be needed in how local and regional contingent geographies of production and consumption are played out at the micro-level. 6. Conclusions: re-creating the rules: re-creating the battleground of agri-food in Europe A considerable amount of social science literature focussed upon GM technologies has tended to concentrate upon the processes of public and consumer perceptions of their risks, and on the relationships between the articulation of science in a more risk conscious society (see

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Doubleday, 2004; Toke, 2004; ESRC, 1999). In the public domain most attention has focussed upon locally-based crop commercialisation and its environmental implications. This paper, alternatively, attempts to address some of the political and regulatory implications of what we might see as the ‘second phase’ of the GM story in the context of what the uneven introduction of GM infers for the mutating nature of agri-industrialism and post-productivism as global and regional paradigms of rural and agri-food development. What is witnessed is a new period of agri-food regulation in Europe which is coping with the realities of its problematic but extensive commercialisation in other parts of the world; the corporate and regulatory pressure (not least from the WTO) to accommodate GM; and the aftermath of a profound period of EU-based public/consumer and NGO-based public concern about such technologies. In this context, and seen through a revised understanding of our rural development models outlined above, a broader supply chain, rather than land-based, perspective is needed; one which integrates key producer and consumer interests, and which re-problematises the State as a key but contradictory vehicle for translating and codifying markets and the competitive spaces of production, consumption and corporate activity. As Mazey and Richardson (2001, p. 219) point out, the GM challenge occurs at a time of signiWcant EU institutional re-building and attempts at risk reduction and management in the EU more generally, whereby: ‘..interactions of government bureaucracies with associations or other corporate economic actors seem to be of crucial importance in linking the macro- and meso-levels and result in the emergence of network conWgurations which will eventually become institutionalisedƒBy seating the appropriate stakeholders at the appropriate seats, bureaucrats both reduce likely resistance to their policy proposals at other policy venues and avoid the blame for subsequent policy failures or Wascos.. the need to construct complex advocacy coalitions in favour of policy innovation is especially pressing for the Commission’. The partial insinuation of GM technologies in the food sectors of Europe begin to cast some analytical light upon the workings of this new, more consultative and stakeholder ‘hybrid model’ of European food regulation at a time when the adoption of the technologies and the new institutionalisation and consumerisation of food policy temporally coincide. In this sense, the onset of GM both as a package of technologies, as a part of corporate strategy, and as part of global trade and consumer politics, provides an important test for the newly assembled EU food regime. Moreover, this process illustrates the ways in which the supra-national State can potentially re-shape many of the principles of the agri-industrial paradigm in ways which signiWcantly shift it towards post-productionism, if not more sustainable rural development. As a result, we can now identify signiWcant diVerences in the rural development trajectories operating on either side

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of the Atlantic (Morgan et al., 2006; Guzman and Martinez-Alier, 2006; Woods, 2006), with greater opportunities for groups of local producers and consumers (see Renting et al., 2004) to create clear regulatory and territorial boundaries from within which they can experiment with real alternatives to GM and the allied processes of agri-industrialism (Knickel and Renting, 2000; Brouwer, 2005; Marsden and Smith, 2005). The particular and problematic insinuation of GM in Europe thus, somewhat perversely, leaves open opportunities for alternatives in agro-food and rural development (Sonnino and Marsden, 2006). SigniWcant amounts of primary empirical research, much of it funded by the EU, has witnessed the development of alternative and non-GM trajectories for agricultural businesses (see van der Ploeg et al., 2002) at local and regional levels. It would thus seem that the ways in which the hybrid model of regulation has operated with regard to GM, and food safety and quality issues more generally in Europe, is one which allows some space for regulatory innovation and implementation (especially on the part of corporate retailers), while also giving some political space for alternative (short-circuiting between groups of consumers and producer) movements and initiatives to take hold in the interstices of the conventional agrifood markets (Roep, 2002). Hence in the context of GM, the social and spatial boundaries between the competing models of agri-food and rural development explored in this analysis are set to grow rather than decline. Under these regulatory circumstances, and despite the attendant overburdensome nature of much of the regulation on conventional producers, agricultural diversity in Europe could thrive. As a result real rural development based upon sustainable (non-GM) alternatives is all to play for in a public context of concern over GM and a new regulatory framework which exposes some of the hallmarks of post-productivism over agri-industrialism. While the paper has attempted to explore these developments in terms of evolving regulatory mechanisms–mechanisms which have their own complex spatial and supply chain eVects-there remain important questions unanswered both at a conceptual level, and with regard to the unfolding regulatory systems themselves. Indeed, the uneven geographies which are suggested here as an outcome of the new hybrid model of food regulation are active agents in shaping the success or otherwise of the regulatory regime itself. It is not yet clear how eVective such a framework will be either in demarcating and containing the occurrence of GM or in quelling (or indeed stimulating) its oppositional status amongst alternative consumers and groups of producers. For instance, the implications for and action of the private corporate sector and the more risk-averse consumer have yet to be fully understood (but see Miele and Murdoch, 2002; Fonte, 2002). There is a conceptual and empirical need, therefore, to examine in more speciWc and geographical detail how these regulatory changes will be publicly legitimated and competitively applied over time and space; and how the

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rival paradigms of agri-food and rural development continue to play out. In this sense the uneven and competitive geographies of risk and regulation which the new EU ‘hybrid model’ has promoted raises some important questions concerning what has been termed here, both the integrative and contested dimensions of GM technologies. We can now see that both of these dimensions are contained in the unfolding regulatory frameworks of the EU, such that they may promote diverse impacts both through agri-food supply chains and across diVerent rural spaces. One consequence, or indeed paradox, is that the current phase of GM development is creating more competitive energy between the rival paradigms outlined here. As discussed in the Wrst part of the paper, at a global level it is giving renewed energy to a revised agri-industrial model which is no longer just based upon the intensiWcation and specialisation of production, but which can now apply a battery of GM techniques to continue to overcome the Kautskian organic and natural obstacles of agri-food development. Yet Europe’s unfolding regulatory model builds on to this a post-productivist set of compromises which are attempting to demarcate and publicly legitimate GM. These competitive tensions are compounded, as discussed in the Wnal part of the paper, by a more fragmented, but nevertheless, increasingly vibrant rural development model which, through forging new linkages between producers and consumers, is re-creating more embedded and protected agrifood niches and spaces across Europe. As such these development models are likely to continue to assert their authority in and through agri-food chains and rural spaces and be fuelled by the actions and mobilisations of diVerent sets of powerful actors and institutions. The outcomes are thus multi-dimensional and still evolving. Integration and contestation are thus two sides of the complex coin that the implementation of GM has brought to the agri-food domain. Acknowledgements The author would like to acknowledge research colleagues: Andrew Flynn, Samarthia Thankappan, Bob Lee, Lisa Carson and Natalia Yakovleva, who are also part of the Food Flagship Research Project (on which this paper is based); in the ESRC Research Centre for Business Relationships, Accountability, Sustainability and Society (BRASS) at CardiV University. References Adam, B., 1999. Industrial food for thought: timescapes of risk. Environmental Values 8, 219–238. Agri-Europe, 2006. ‘EU loses WTO dispute over bio-tech crop authorisations, February 10, 2006, no. 2194. Barham, E., 2003. Translating terroir: the global challenge of French AOC labeling. Journal of Rural Studies 19 (1), 127–138. Bijman, J., Tait, J., 2002. Public policies inXuencing innovation in the agrochemical and biotechnology and seeds industries. Science and Public Policy 29 (7), 245–251.

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