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Abstract
The agri-food sector has undergone both rapid public regulation and private standards setting in
the past two decades engendering new forms of governance of food supply chains. Food safety
has been at the forefront of these reforms, but increasingly food standards reflect a range of
ethical concerns about food production and supply. The communication of standards with
ethical implications to consumers relies upon labelling and marketing but is underpinned by
schemes of certification and audit, which in turn entail effective systems of traceability of food
products. Traceability reaches from food production and movement through the supply chain
to the form of the food’s consumption. A feature of contemporary governing has been the development
of the regulatory state, where the state seeks to widen and lengthen its governing
reach through steering and utilising private forms of governance. The regulatory state directs
the private sector to effectively self-regulate food supply chains within legally required
standards; but this process of governance can be a contest of differing values. At the European
level, the revision of European Union (EU) food law (EC 178/2002) has put traceability at the
centre of its reform of the governance of supply chains.
The promotion of ethical concerns around food standards has emerged from private governance
sources – notably civil society based organisations who have sought to promote both particularistic
and broader concerns around food production from animal welfare to fair trade. In the
corporate sector both manufacturers and retailers, have taken up a wide range of standards and
certification schemes which cover ethical as well as other concerns: from integrated farming
processes to food assurance schemes to local food provenance schemes. The unfolding scope
and nature of ethical concerns around food are explained below. The role of civil society organisations
in promoting new standards for food incorporating ethical criteria points to the inter-
relationships of the state (including the EU) with the corporate sector and civil society
organisations in the unfolding regulation and governance of food supply chains. These regulatory
and governance trajectories are examined in more detail to illustrate the different roles that
food traceability is being asked to underpin. Amongst these roles, the EU’s sustainability goals
for the agri-food sector inter-relate with ethically informed regulations. Yet such is the dynamic
and unfolding nature of these trajectories that public regulation can lag behind the private governance
initiatives. The different roles that traceability as a policy and governance instrument
is being called upon to deliver are dynamic and unfolding. There is an increasing traceability
burden and so challenges for both public regulators and private managers of food supply chains.