New players in the food and farm sector? Globalization and private actors

Scholars of food and agriculture policy tend to be interested in how public officials address societal problems through defining regulation. Less attention has been paid to how (groups of) individuals engage in self-regulation, where producers voluntarily adopt certain standards (e.g. fair trade) or consumers demand products that meet certain standards. With globalization and increasingly complex forms of international cooperation and coordination, the self-regulation of private actors has become a rampant empirical phenomenon in many policy sectors – and food and agriculture is no exception. Corporations participate in transnational governance, e.g. by practicing corporate social responsibility, while consumers engage in transnational political consumerism. But which role do private actors in the food and farm sector play? Why are some private actors eager to reclaim regulatory authority? How does their involvement affect the power structures in the sector? Guided by these research questions, this paper contributes to the ‘new politics’ perspective on food and agriculture by shedding light on the interests and self-organizing capacity of consumers and producers. Based on Eurobarometer data on consumers’ attitudes towards self-regulation and European Commission reports about the self-regulation of food producers, this paper shows that the politics of food and agriculture have become as open as other areas of regulatory policy-making affected by globalization, while acknowledging its particularly complex nature.