Is Global-Gap a Regulator? The Role of a Private Standard in the European Food Governance

In the European Union, the food safety policy combines public regulations with private standards, according to the co-regulation principles. GLOBALGAP is dedicated to encouraging Good Agricultural Practices in food production. It was initiated in 1997 by European retailers who developed a shared certification scheme inducing producers to comply with requirements on food safety, sustainable production methods, and welfare of workers and animals. The rise of standards in the governance of agrifood chains has been analyzed mainly as an issue of legal pluralism: public regulations and voluntary standards are commonly presented as competing with and reinforcing legal systems at the same time. By analyzing the standard itself and the way it is implemented, we demonstrate that the standard play a more complex part. First, GlobalGAP is composed of heterogeneous kinds of prescriptions, such as good practices, proof recording, and the rule of law. Thus stakeholders may interpret it as a managerial, pedagogical or coercive instrument. Second, we will examine the issue of the rule of law in an international voluntary standard. By referring to national or local laws while organizing supranational food supply chains, the private standard creates a space of equivalence for heterogeneous state regulations: in this regard, the private standard organizes competition between public regulations. Third, by dealing with various issues in an “holistic approach”, Globalgap puts together various regulation area and create a rationality that exceeds each of the legal prescriptions it is based on. More than an instrument of legal pluralism, then, Globalgap is a basis for a private codification of public law. To conclude, we argue that instead of studying co-regulation by examining private standards on the one hand and public regulations on the other hand, scholars would gain an even better understanding by examining the concrete situations of interactions or syncretism between the two schemes.