| Oosterveer, Peter (2004) Global Regulation of Food and Consumer Involvement: Labelling of ... |
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Oosterveer, Peter (2004) Global Regulation of Food and Consumer Involvement: Labelling of sustainable fisheries using the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC). In: Political Consumerism: Its motivations, power, and conditions in the Nordic countries and elsewhere: Proceedings from the 2nd International Seminar on Political Consumerism, Oslo, 26-29 August 2004. - Copenhagen : Nordic Council, 2005 - ISBN 92-893-1129-0 - p. 339 - 363.
Food production and consumption is increasingly organised in global networks. Therefore, existing nation-state based environmental and social regulation is no longer sufficient and new regulatory arrangements are needed. This paper will study the possibilities of involving consumers as new actors in regulating the social and environmental consequences of global food production and consumption.
Starting with elaborating Castells’ view of globalisation as the creation of a network society, this paper will look at ‘the space of flows’ dominating over ‘the space of places’. Modern regulation of globalised food production and consumption is based on a WTO-dominated discourse allowing only regulation on the basis of general product standards and product related production methods. However, consumers in Western countries are more and more demanding regulation on the basis of the environmental effects of the production process, which is not accepted within the WTO discourse. An alternative arrangement is combining regulation at the level of global flows of food with regulation of environmental and social consequences at the concrete places of food production and food consumption, through the private labelling of food. One interesting arrangement to do this is the use of the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) label. This paper will provide a theoretical overview of possibilities for consumer involvement and apply the example of MSC as an illustration for this innovative practice. |
