As it leaves the European Union, the UK must ensure that its agricultural standards remain high and robust, its farm supports reflect the popular desire for greater equity and incentives for deep environmental stewardship, and its regulatory process is not overly controlled by private interests. In turn, the United States will need to find ways to incentivize the pursuit of environmental goals alongside food safety goals, an outcome currently disincentivized by the prevailing prescriptive regulatory climate and focus on a singular vision of food safety. As the early years of FSMA implementation begin, standard setting bodies at state, hybrid and non-state levels may wish to seek compliance with food safety requirements through process-oriented controls, relying less on prescriptive standards. Internationally, bench marking and harmonization efforts will need to gain ground, to avoid further fragmentation of the produce market in response to Brexit and FSMA, and to serve as a step toward ‘governing the governance’ of food safety. Harmonization efforts are seeing gradual gains. However, these efforts thus far have failed to deliver the goal of true harmonization within the realities of articulated global markets. In the face of regime transitions and evolving regulation, attempts at harmonization are still resulting in additional complexity and overlap between standards. It will remain to be seen over the coming years whether bench marking can deliver on its full promise, how to trim cannabis and whether new global bars will be set by the biggest international standards.
Additional research that could follow my work in this dissertation might examine whether and to what degree different structures of fresh leafy greens supply chains affect how farmers view the standards they must meet, and how food safety requirements are built. It would be useful to explore whether the differences I observed between US and UK leafy greens farmers can also be observed within only one nation, to separate and evaluate the influence of national attitudes and of different kinds of standards. Work could also meaningfully examine how length of supply chain and time elapsed between harvest and sale impact food safety risk management in particular contexts, to establish whether and why safety outcomes are inherently better in shorter supply chains than in longer ones. It will be crucial in the near term to evaluate how well harmonization and bench marking efforts are able to reduce the audit burden that farmers face, while ensuring adequate food safety controls across globally articulated markets. Future research will be needed to assess social and environmental impacts brought by the full implementation of FSMA requirements, conveyed to farmers through certifications such as LGMA, USDA Harmonized GAP, and Global GAP HPSS. Research will also be needed to assess the impacts of a redesigned UK agricultural policy after withdrawal from the EU, and the effects of greater privatization of food safety enforcement. Food safety risk management in 2018 is at a global inflection point. As outbreaks in developed nations continue to highlight problems within fresh produce supply chains, both governments and private actors are devising controls to manage risk within extensive global supply networks.
At the same time, food safety market pressures are creating environmental externalities and sustainability of agriculture is increasingly under fire. Global supply chains today demand solutions that can simultaneously yield safety guarantees for the consumer, legal protection for the retailer, and sustainability and feasibility for the farmer. Supply chains worldwide are extending, but fresh lettuce is partly insulated from this effect due to its short shelf life. The future of risk management in fresh lettuce may not be one of longer supply chains in the same way as for other commodities, but rather of a search for improvements in efficiency of supply chains . Food safety standards are evolving rapidly in the face of these many competing concerns, responding to calls for harmonization, changing borders, and new regulations. Finding the ideal toolkit for food safety requirements and the proper balance between private and public regulation will be essential as these processes continue.Farming is inherently an activity born of nature and natural processes that are not entirely subject to human control. Without careful efforts to the contrary, taking food safety protection to its logical extremes within capitalist production systems can deliver less than ideal results, leading to fresh goods becoming manufactured goods, retailers becoming regulators, and a farming landscape that ceases to be in harmony with the natural environment. This dissertation is ultimately full of questions: What is our relationship to our food? What are the right goals by which to manage a farm, and for whom?
Should the provision of one social good outweigh another when public health is at stake? In the search for answers at all levels, I believe that it is morally incumbent upon the observers of a market economy to understand and advocate for the most inclusive solutions possible. Inclusive solutions to the problem of ensuring food safety in fresh produce must consider impacts on the land, on the farmers who grow food, and on the consumers whose choices are enabled or constrained by how food is marketed to them. Models of risk management in agricultural production are made better or worse by how broadly costs and benefits are conceptualized, and how well ecological goals are managed alongside social and economic ones. Those models which best deliver, at once, on all the many social and environmental goals which we ascribe to farming are those which we as a society should strive to enable; those models that take a narrower view are those which we should strive to transform.A robust mix of domestic and international policies increasingly recognize the importance of renewable energy in combating climate change, achieving energy independence, and stimulating rural redevelopment. In addition to wind and solar power, biomass-based energy from crops and forests holds significant untapped potential. Projections indicate that by 2030 the U.S. will consume 329 million dry tons of forest and agricultural feed stocks for energy production, primarily for cofiring electricity generation facilities.1 State renewable portfoliostandards2 and limits on stationary source emissions of greenhouse gasses 3 are incentivizing electricity generators and other large emission sources to seek out a long term, reliable supply of combustible agricultural and forest biomass.4 Likewise, mandates embedded within the federal Renewable Fuel Standard 5 will require significant biomass supplies to produce up to sixteen billion gallons of advanced bio-fuels each year. On the supply-side, the Biomass Crop Assistance Program attempts to link agricultural producers of crops, such as Miscanthus, switch grass, hybrid poplar, and camelina with qualified biomass conversion facilities. Mandates and subsidies aside, scholars who have empirically evaluated producers’ willingness to participate in the biomass industry have unearthed a plethora of critical issues that farmers face in the adoption of energy crops.6 Producers unfamiliar with novel cropping and harvesting practices must adopt new techniques and invest in production infrastructure that is costly and involves substantial risk. Adding to the novelty of a perennial cropping system is the likelihood that producers will be obligated to meet environmental and social sustainability requirements incorporated within bio-energy policies. For example, the European Union’s Renewable Energy Directive requires sustainability certification to protect against conversion of high conservation and carbon value lands, vertical growing system and agricultural pollution.7 U.S. producers seeking to access Europe’s emerging renewable energy market must obtain third-party certification under an approved sustainability standard. Domestically, the RFS2 excludes bio-fuels derived from newly converted agricultural or forest land8 and, depending on the outcome of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency studies,9 may require in the future some form of sustainability accounting. Although organic certification has been available in the U.S. for two decades, and some environmental requirements already apply on certain agricultural lands, the vast majority of potential biomass producers in the U.S. are not familiar with sustainability requirements or production certification schemes of any type.10 Compounding uncertainty are the diverse set of end-users obligated to achieve GHG reductions under bio-energy statutes—ranging from petroleum refiners to bio-fuels power generators—most of whom are unfamiliar with rural culture and agricultural practices. All these barriers to adoption stand in the way of more rapidly developing the nation’s bio-economy. Moreover, potential biomass producers consistently voice concerns related to risk, cost, and the negative impacts on social networks when discussing abandonment of traditional commodity crop production in favor of bio-energy feedstocks.
Contractual agreements are one way to address these concerns and bring together growers and end-users to reduce uncertainty on both sides of the equation. Scholars from the disciplines of economics, finance, rural sociology, and the law have developed generalized theoretical approaches to contracting from risk-minimizing, cost-minimizing, or sociological-compatibility perspectives. In the rapidly evolving world of renewable energy, it is clear that existing theoretical approaches may not address adequately the new challenges of a bio-based economy. Rather, a comparative analysis of the focused, goal specific orientation of each disciplinary perspective has enabled us to identify potential areas of conflict that, within the defined space of biomass production contracts, may engender significant barriers to innovation adoption—obstacles that a developing industry must overcome in the near term in order to secure sufficient biomass supply to meet demand. Categorizing and approaching potential issues from the perspective of the biomass producer has allowed us to develop a novel, interdisciplinary Biomass Contract Framework and methodology to address farmer concerns in a systematic manner. The framework facilitates contracting parties’ ability to identify tradeoffs and strike balances between conflicting contractual goals when applied to biomass-specific issues. Accordingly, the development of the Biomass Contract Framework provides greater theoretical understanding to the development of biomass supply chains and the importance of contract design to facilitate reliable sources of renewable energy. And, although the specific context of this article remains the biomass supply chain for renewable energy production, this framework could apply in other supply chain contexts involving similarly innovative end products and disruptive technologies. Part II describes foundational, theoretical considerations taken into account in the Biomass Contract Framework. Part III outlines the framework within the context of two leading biomass feed stocks—perennial energy grasses and corn stover. The article concludes in Part IV with our observations of the biomass supply chain and recommendations for future research, including governance considerations and the ability of sustainability standards to lower transaction costs.Contract theorists have devoted considerable literature to determining which organizational structure is most likely or appropriate for the developing biomass industry. Scholars have placed particular emphasis on complete vertical integration, commodity market models, cooperative structures, and vertical coordination. For reasons detailed below, we assume avertically coordinated industry structure. No commodity markets currently exist for bio-energy crops. Experience tells us that spot markets traditionally fail to develop due to inadequate competition and price information, producer unwillingness to invest in land and production assets, and inadequate reflection of consumer preferences for product attributes in prices. Although proposals to develop energy crop commodity markets do exist, the current chicken versus-egg problem hinders any significant progress. More specifically, biomass conversion facilities are unwilling to engage in substantial capital investment absent a stable source of raw material , while farmers remain skeptical about converting otherwise profitable and productive land resources to dedicated bio-energy crop production in the absence of a reliable market for their products. As spot markets for biomass commodities are unlikely to emerge until the industry is much more well-established, we concur with Altman and Johnson that current structural constraints make it likely that the bio-energy industry must be vertically coordinated in its early stages. Although a few large-scale, purely vertically integrated models have arisen, these models may have limited feasibility, particularly in areas such as the Midwest. By “vertical integration,” we refer to industry structures where a party owns and operates all levels of the value chain. While initial pilot-scale projects may utilize successfully this type of wholly integrated structure, other financial, management, and environmental constraints may limit end-users’ ability to vertically integrate sufficient land and production resources to supply large-scale bio-refineries over the medium- and long-term. Complete vertical integration seems more feasible when end-users are able to secure large contiguous tracts of land from a few large landowners. Particularly in the productive Midwest Corn Belt region, high agricultural land values may constrain energy crop production to “marginal” lands, creating the need for thousands of smaller tracts of farm land owned and operated by a diffuse set of landowners and producers. Moreover, vertical integration of sufficient land and production resources requires enormous start-up capital, which may also prove prohibitive for all but the most capital-rich end users in a fledgling bio-energy industry.