While this arrangement reduces the costliness of regulation from the perspective of states, it is uncertain whether governance accomplished with the assistance of these private actors can reliably deliver better outcomes, and if this governance system can be considered adequate from the perspectives of conflict of interest and robust accountability .Fresh lettuces and salad greens provide a useful window into the regulatory challenges inherent in devolving regulatory authority from governments to non-state actors. The longer supply chains of industrial leafy greens production require larger, more complex networks of quality management, whether or not products cross borders between production and sale. In these long supply chains, quality problems such as contamination by pathogens have immediate and far-reaching effects on the consumer populace, demanding control and solutions. In one way, devolving regulatory authority to lettuce producers or other private entities can expedite the process of responding to such problems, but it can also result in solutions that are incomplete and leave both governments and the public without recourse to push for better outcomes.The many changes and reorganizations of environments and human populations that have given rise to the modern food system have also presented questions for the long-term sustainability of modern agricultural patterns. Can we expect that agriculture and food consumption can continue the way they are now, commercial greenhouse benches without eroding the basis of global production?
Industrial agriculture in its modern sense is associated with a long list of environmental harms, including pollution of air and waterways, depletion of soil nutrients and harm to soil biota, buildup of toxic compounds in growing environment from the use of agrochemicals, and increased emissions from and dependency on environmentally damaging inputs such as fossil fuels and industrial chemicals . Although negative environmental impacts are well documented, less is known about the capacity of the natural environment to withstand negative impacts. Where the rate of damage outstrips the ability of the natural environment to recover, modern agriculture faces a bleak future. Since the 1987 report of the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development introduced the idea of ‘sustainable development’ to differentiate it from unsustainable business-as-usual development, sustainability has been popularly discussed and employed as a concept at every level of politics and daily life. Like any concept that has simultaneously become a rallying cry for scientists, activists, policy makers and the public, there is little real consensus about how the term should be used from one forum to the next, and what actions should be predicated upon it. What should be sustained, by whom and for whom, over what period of time, how, and why? The range of sustainability framings found in popular and scientific literature reflect three basic categories: the pure ecological stability of environmental systems, intergenerational equity, and the ideal of economic efficiency . Power and visibility add an additional dimension, as sustainability is more often the rallying cry of those at the edges of political participation, than of those with greatest political power .
Sustainability goals are also closely linked to issues of economic and environmental governance and the generation-bridging institutions through which governance is accomplished . In practice, working definitions of sustainability in agriculture often combine one or more of the above categories into a blended socio-economic-environmental-equity sense of stability over time. For example, sustainability may be framed as “the need to ensure a better quality of life for all, now and into the future, in a just and equitable manner, whilst living within the limits of supporting ecosystems” . Food movements have picked up and combined elements of these framings as calls to action, in the California organic agriculture movement, the move to local food diets, low-carbon diets, and many others. The implications of environmental impacts and sustainability concerns emerge in especially sharp relief in the production of fresh leafy greens. The transition of many leafy greens farms from smaller-scale hand-harvested farms to larger, more industrialized operations run by corporate conglomerates has had consequences for environmental management. For growers experiencing pressure to produce food under specific safety conditions and below certain thresholds of cost, ecological health has, by necessity, become de-emphasized in the face of economic challenges . Systems thinking that links food production methods to broader health costs and environmental damage is an important tool that is still lacking in food policy circles . Combined with growing separation between consumers and food, increasing corporate power, and retractions of public regulatory power, high profile food safety failures have had important consequences for environmental sustainability in leafy greens production systems, which I will explore in detail in the course of my comparative case study.The new economics of corporate control of agriculture, the balance of public and private regulatory power, and distancing consumption from production are all beginning to present new risks to health and safety.
Health risks from food can come in many forms, including the presence of pathogens that can cause foodborne illness. Foodborne illness is estimated to cost the world economy $14 billion annually . While staggering, no number can fully convey the degree of human impact, because many cases of foodborne illness are never reported. While the potential for food to make us sick is not unique to modern times, current patterns of food transport and storage have created the potential for far greater impacts than previously recorded. Food safety risks are now able to go unnoticed at field level in part because of larger farm size and more highly mechanized production. Contaminated foodstuff can then travel farther and faster through extended supply chains, creating outbreaks that affect a much larger number of people than ever before . A paradox appears to be developing: The more our food system succeeds at providing more food to more people across larger distances, the more it includes the possibility of mistakes with ever greater reach. The fresh leafy greens industry in the United States has seen several recent widespread health and safety problems emerging from industrial agricultural production. As mentioned at the start of this chapter, the parallel outbreaks in November and April of 2010 of E. coli O157:H7 in romaine lettuce have called attention to persistent systemic problems in leafy greens production. These outbreaks make an eerily familiar echo of the 2006 E. coli outbreak in California spinach, indicating that the production and supply chain problems underlying the original outbreak are still in need of solutions. Review of food safety outbreaks has indicated that fresh produce causes the largest portion of all foodborne illnesses in the United States . Pathogens can contaminate leafy greens via contaminated water or crop inputs, unclean processing equipment, or via contact with workers who are ill or otherwise carrying pathogens . Fresh agricultural products like leafy greens can spoil quickly once harvested, and must be transported and stored under carefully controlled refrigeration and time horizons to reduce the risk of illness . However, research in the United States indicates that actual storage and display temperatures are frequently sub-optimal for product lifespan and foodborne illness risk . While proper refrigeration significantly retards the growth and proliferation of foodborne pathogens during storage, pathogens can survive and continue to grow slowly at temperatures just above freezing . Leafy greens from many different sources are often washed and processed at a few central locations, which can spread food safety risks, grow bench and greatly complicate the work of identifying the source of a problem. Packing into plastic bags can improve some aspects of food quality and safety during storage by protecting delicate greens from damage and additional bacterial exposure, but can also provide a breeding ground for any pre-existing contamination . Bags of salad greens can wait 15-17 days between production and sale, allowing ample time for problems to develop before purchase , let alone during subsequent home storage by consumers. Scholars of the food system have noted that current food-safety governance has emerged within a production system that is already primed to create these sorts of problems because of its long supply chains and industrial, centralized structure , and that that structure itself is rarely examined as a contributing factor or a candidate for change . The devolved nature of food regulation also plays a role in amplifying risks.
The Economic Research Service of the United States Department of Agriculture admitted after the 2006 E. coli outbreak from bagged spinach that USDA kept no formal statistics on how many growers of fresh leafy greens followed which specific practices to reduce contamination, and that regulation of those practices was handled by third party auditors and private safety standards rather than by direct regulatory intervention by branches of the federal or state governments . In leafy greens as well as other industrial food products, the same system that ensures unprecedented quantities of food across ever longer distances also presents the possibility of increasingly hard-to-solve problems for public health . New forms of regulation and supply chain oversight are needed to ensure that public health problems are adequately managed, alongside goals of environmental health and sustainability, economic stability, and social equity.The structural, technological, organizational and social changes that the 20th century has wrought on the global food system have created a host of growing difficulties in the provision of modern food. Using leafy greens production in the United States and United Kingdom as a window, we see a food system that has formed cracks as it grew and changed, cracks which threaten its future stability. Governments and private actors have responded to challenges within the food system through diverse systems of regulation aimed at correcting market failures, but continuing difficulties such as food safety scares and environmental degradation indicate that current modes of regulation are insufficient to provide optimal outcomes. Today’s leafy greens consumers are increasingly distanced both physically and psychologically from the field-level production of their salad products, with little actionable knowledge of potential health risks or environmental impacts. Many farmers within the increasingly corporate and industrial leafy greens system are losing managerial control over the lands they work, even as food safety requirements increase. Industrial production methods are creating mounting threats to environmental sustainability of production systems, while fresh food supply chains continue to experience public health failures. Holistic systems-based responses are needed to solve these problems, but the durability of existing production methods and regulatory frameworks makes transformative solutions increasingly hard to find or deploy. Private regulation has risen to the fore as a way of protecting retail reputations and delivering new consumer guarantees in a fast-moving market, but questions remain. What kinds of food safety controls are likely to deliver the best outcomes for public health, without overburdening farmers or threatening environmental sustainability? In the chapters that follow, I will explore these issues through the comparative case of domestic leafy greens production systems in United States and United Kingdom. Both nations are experiencing a trend toward increasingly intensive and capitalized produce agriculture, along with a rise in the prominence of private regulation of food safety by food retailers and independent standard-setting bodies. Both nations are also grappling with changes to the structure of government and the mandates of public food safety regulatory bodies, including new federal food safety regulations in the United States and the exit of the UK from the European Union. The challenge of how to ensure microbiologically safe, environmentally-sensitive agricultural systems is also a growing concern in both nations. However, the US production system appears to be struggling more regularly with pathogen outbreaks from leafy greens, and regulation of food safety in leafy greens is having unintended ecological consequences that are not echoed to the same degree in the UK system. These differences provide an opportunity to compare and contrast leafy greens production and the regulation of food safety in each location, in search of factors affecting the social and environmental outcome of various public and private food safety controls. Through my research, I will show that regulatory and non-governmental responses to food safety challenges in the United Kingdom are leading to greater farmer satisfaction with food safety regulation and more environmentally sustainable production practices, providing clues for the creation of improved regulatory systems for food safety in leafy greens. In the following chapters, I will present my comparative case and its results.