This document summarizes current thinking on food system governance. It discusses how governance involves guiding and regulating different aspects of the food system, including land use, commodity chains, science/technology, and culture. Issues discussed include nutritional inequalities, competition over dietary diversity, and the complex nutrition transition. The document also examines how value chains are increasingly controlled by a few major actors and how standards like GlobalGap can both benefit and disadvantage suppliers. It reviews the roles of different international organizations and agreements in shaping food system governance.

1. Resetting the Australian table:
Food value chain governance & food safety
19 August 2015
Jane Dixon
Current thinking re food system governance

2. Food system governance
 Governance: giving purpose (guiding/directing) & regulating
(restraining/controlling) (Duncan 2015)
 ‘Play of the game’ (after Williamson 2000; Neilson and Pritchard 2009)
or an ongoing and contested negotiation between actors
with different resources, including authority over:
Land tenure and use, including bio-security and bio-diversity framings/protocols
Commodity chain input-output structures, including food standards (safety,
nutrition), supply chain contract relations, marketing standards, finance capital
Science and technology
Trade in food/surplus disposal/domestic self-sufficiency
Culinary culture, including branding of traditional/authentic foods, recipes

3. Issues for food system
governance
1. Nutritional inequalities are based as much in an
abundance of calories as they are in under nutrition
2. Competition over dietary diversity set to intensify:
limits to growth in agriculture (exhausted agri-
environments, climate change, urban encroachment on
food producing habitats)
growth in middle-class markets keen for ‘high status’
protein and imported novel foods
3. A complex and uneven nutrition transition promotes
good health and disease, making it difficult to determine
global policy prescriptions

4. Value chain guidance and control
Governments have ceded responsibility for food
production, marketing and distribution
Producer coops less common, even fewer consumer
coops
The corporatization of whole sectors – meat, fruit and
vegetables, grains – lends itself to input-output control
by a few actors: ‘Big Food’ or ‘Big Retail’

5. Retailer regulation - GlobalGap
 A consortium of global supermarket chains which have
certified 80000 suppliers worldwide
 Omni-standards often much higher than national
standards
 Consumers benefit as do contract suppliers, as long as
they can maintain the audit ritual and ever higher
benchmarks
 Small, uncontracted suppliers may be displaced
 The Europeanisation of taste and production methods
(Bruneri et al. 2010; Reardon et al. 2010)

6. Value chain control: input-output
structure

7. Value chain control: hegemonic
contract model

8. Science and guiding governance
The calorie “popularized a set of assumptions that allowed
Americans to see food as an instrument of power, and
to envisage a ‘world food problem’ amenable to political
and scientific interventions” (Cullather 2007:34)
The science of macro nutrients and vitamins followed =
Vitamania (see Dixon 2009)
The rising prevalence of diet-related disease exerts a contradictory
force: creates tension between governments, agri-food
corporations and international regulatory agencies AND provides
the same corporations with a new capital accumulation platform:
disease-reduction products and services

9. Government health promotion

10. Commodity value chain governance or food system
values governance?

11. Play of the game mobilisations in the
multilateral sphere
1. Hunger alleviation and free trade [FAO, AoA, WTO] Thirty year
repositioning regarding domestic self-sufficiency, international food
trade and productivist agriculture
2. The human security intervention [FAO, WHO, UN High Level Task
Force] Connecting the Right to Food to political and social stability
3. The public health intervention [FAO, WHO] Connecting the RtF with
slow MDG progress on child and maternal mortality, and diet-related
morbidity
4. The sustainable development intervention [IFPRI, IAASTD, FAO]
Linking rural crisis with the RtF, and since to the SDGs
5. The food sovereignty movement intervention [Committee on Food
Security, civil society networks] Connecting 1, 3 and 4
(Pritchard, Dixon et al. in prep)

12. FAO position
‘It is not enough to produce more. If societies are to flourish in the
long term, they must produce sustainably. The past paradigm of
input-intensive production cannot meet the challenge. Productivity
growth must be achieved through sustainable intensification. That
means, inter alia, conserving, protecting and enhancing natural
resources and ecosystems, improving the livelihoods and well-being
of people and social groups and bolstering their resilience’ (FAO
2014: xiii)

13. WHO position
….as part of the Post 2015 Development process
Health is a precondition for, as well as an indicator and an
outcome of progress in sustainable development…
‘In contrast to the current set of health-related MDGs,
there is now a greater recognition of the need to focus on
means as well as ends: health as a human right; health
equity; equality of opportunity; global agreements …that
enhance health security; stronger and more resilient health
systems…’ (WHO 2012)

14. Regulatory levers for food and
nutrition security
Dixon 2014

15. Promote and advocate the
following principles
 The right to [nutritious] food advances the right to health, and is a fundamental
input to national and human development
 Access to nutritious food is a key dimension of human security, while human
security underpins nutrition security
 International and national food policies to address the environmentally
unsustainable production and consumption of food
 National food sovereignty – in the form of government scrutiny of free trade
agreements, land and sea leasing, private equity schemes and foreign
investment in food companies, control of food advertising - should take
precedence over free trade as administered under current WTO rules
 An approach to feeding the world equitably will require major changes at all
levels of governance and a reorientation of many international organizations
and programmes (Kickbush 2010, p. 25)

16. Final observations
The SDG process is reinstating a role for nation states in food
system governance
Countries are grappling with agriculture for export earnings and for
dietary diversity self-sufficiency (eg Thailand has Kitchen to the
World AND government auspiced self-sufficiency program)
Value chain methodologies and interventions are important but so is
reorienting whole food supply-demand relations around dietary
diversity (aka nutrition sensitive food systems)

17. FAO
 1945: ‘Freedom from want cannot be achieved without effective
collaboration among nations’
 1954: ‘Guidelines and Principles of Surplus Disposal’ : wealthy
agricultural nations to act with ‘mutual responsibility’ and to take
‘coordinated action’ to coordinate food aid and trade (FAO 1985: 19)
 1996: convened World Food Summit (WFS) & Declaration of
Rome: ‘We reaffirm that a peaceful, stable and enabling political, social and
economic environment is the essential foundation which will enable States to
give adequate priority to food security and poverty eradication. Democracy,
promotion and protection of all human rights and fundamental freedoms,
including the right to development, and the full and equal participation of men
and women are essential for achieving sustainable food security for all’ (FAO
1996)

18. Agreement on Agriculture (AoA)
 Post WW 2: agriculture was excluded from the
multilateral provisions of the General Agreement on
Tariffs and Trade (GATT)
 1994: Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) and its
enforcement through the World Trade Organization
(WTO) – reign in subsidies and barriers to cross
national trade
 the AoA and WTO legitimized ongoing agricultural
subsidies in the global North (Pritchard 2009)
 Bi-lateral and multi-lateral free trade agreements
pursued in absence of global agreements

19. Co-evolution of sustainable development
and health promotion agendas
 1978: The Declaration of Alma Ata with its emphasis on human health as both
a resource to a socially and economically productive life and an outcome
 1986: The Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion and its referencing of the
global responsibility to manage the conservation of natural resources
 1987: The Healthy Cities Project, and its emphasis on the physical and social
environmental determinants of human functioning
 1991: The 3rd World Health Conference on Health Promotion (jointly
sponsored by the WHO and UNEP) which developed the Sundsvall
Declaration on Supportive Environments for Health
 1992: the adoption of the Sundsvall Declaration at the Rio Earth Summit, with
the first principle stating: “Human beings are at the centre of concerns for
sustainable development. They are entitled to a healthy and productive life in
harmony with nature”
 Applied to food security in the Swiss Health Promotion Foundation’s Triggering
Debate -White Paper: The Food System (Kickbush 2010), auspiced by IHUPE

20. The right to food
 1999: UN Committee on Economic, Social & Cultural Rights
which monitors States’ compliance with the International
Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR),
adopted General Comment No. 12 on the Right to Food: ‘The right
to adequate food is realized when every man, woman and child, alone or in
community with others, has physical and economic access at all times to
adequate food or means for its procurement’.
 2000: Appointment of the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food
 2004: FAO Council adopted the Voluntary Guidelines to Support the
Progressive Realization of the Right to Adequate Food in the Context of
National Food Security
 2009: FAO established the Committee on Food Security with support from
High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition

21. Don’t forget regional agreements
 ASEAN Integrated Food Security (AIFS) Framework
and Strategic Plan of Action on Food Security in the
ASEAN Region (SPA-FS)
 ASEAN Multi-Sectoral Framework on Climate
Change: Agriculture and Forestry Towards Food
Security
 ASEAN+3 Comprehensive Strategy on Food
Security and Bioenergy Development (APTCS-
FSBD) Framework and Strategic Plan of Action on
Food and Energy Security (SPA-FES)

22. The food system is based on
other social systems
 Nutrition and bio-sensitive food systems: Food safety,
bio-security, biodiversity
 Human security systems: freedom from violence,
access to land
 Social protection systems: minimum wages, sickness…