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Journal of Hunger & Environmental Nutrition

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Sustainable Food Systems in Europe: Policies, Realities and Futures

Geof Raynerab; David Barlingb; Tim Langb a Brunel University, b City University, London, England

To cite this Article Rayner, Geof , Barling, David and Lang, Tim(2008) 'Sustainable Food Systems in Europe: Policies,

Realities and Futures', Journal of Hunger & Environmental Nutrition, 3: 2, 145 168 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/19320240802243209 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19320240802243209

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Journal 1932-0256 1932-0248 WHEN of Hunger & Environmental Nutrition Vol. 3, No. 2-3, June 2008: pp. 136 Nutrition,

Sustainable Food Systems in Europe: Policies, Realities and Futures

Geof Rayner, PhD David Barling, PhD Tim Lang, PhD

JOURNAL OF HUNGER Rayner, Barling, and Lang& ENVIRONMENTAL NUTRITION

ABSTRACT. This article reviews the food sustainability challenges facing

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the 27-nation member European Union (EU). It describes the evolution of sustainable development policy in Europe against the background of the EUs evolution and diverse membership, with particular reference to agriculture and food. It argues that while sustainability challenges in agriculture have received considerable policy attention, those facing the powerful manufacturing and retail segments of the food industry have barely been addressed. Given the scale and complexity of issues encompassing the food industry and its environmental, social, economic, and health effects, public health analysis and policy auditing should be rethought on the basis of an ecological public health perspective.

KEYWORDS. Europe, EU, agriculture, food, food industry, ecological

public health

Geof Rayner is Professor Associate in Public Health, Brunel University, Visiting Research Fellow, City University, GRAssociates Consultancy (E-mail: Geof@ GRAssociates.org.uk). David Barling is Senior Lecturer in Food Policy, City University, London, England (E-mail: d.barling@city.ac.uk). Tim Lang is Professor of Food Policy, City University, London, England. (E-mail: t.lang@city.ac.uk). Address correspondence to: Geof Rayner, Foxhall House, Foxhall Farm, Northamptonshire NN6 9JL (E-mail: Geof@GRAssociates.org.uk). Journal of Hunger & Environmental Nutrition, Vol. 3(23) 2008 Available online at http://www.haworthpress.com 2008 by The Haworth Press. All rights reserved. doi:10.1080/19320240802243209

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INTRODUCTION
Sustainable development means that the needs of the present generation should be met without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. It is an overarching objective of the European Union set out in the Treaty [of Rome], governing all the Unions policies and activities. It is about safeguarding the earths capacity to support life in all its diversity and is based on the principles of democracy, gender equality, solidarity, the rule of law and respect for fundamental rights, including freedom and equal opportunities for all. It aims at the continuous improvement of the quality of life and well-being on Earth for present and future generations. To that end, it promotes a dynamic economy with full employment and a high level of education, health protection, social and territorial cohesion and environmental protection in a peaceful and secure world, respecting cultural diversity. Council of the European Union, Review of the EU Sustainable1 Development Strategy, 9 June 2006 This statement summarizes the high aspirations of the European Union (EU) in the arena of sustainable development (SD). The document goes on to say, however, that the EU is also beset by numerous and enduring challenges ranging from unsustainable trends in relation to climate change and energy use; threats to public health, poverty, and social exclusion; demographic pressure and ageing; management of natural resources; biodiversity loss; land use; and transport. These together require a strong sense of urgency and a long-term perspective. The main unifying challenge, the document observes, is to gradually change our current unsustainable consumption and production patterns and the non-integrated approach to policy-making. This article reviews the current shape and direction of the European food system against the backdrop of the EUs high aspirations for sustainability, above, and provides one approach to their conceptual integration. It considers the sustainability challenge in the food production and consumption system and proposes that, although the goal for sustainability remains somewhat vague, there are opportunities for a more integrated approach to emerge. It is suggested that the authors own developing formulation of an ecological public health approach offers one such avenue.2,3

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We further propose that the cause of sustainable development requires significant and hard policy choices about how to address serious issues in the food chain in the context of competing policy priorities emanating from within the food chain and the wider economic, social, and environmental policy context. Cutting across the EUs sustainable development goals, for example, are policies prioritizing the international competitiveness of European industries in the global economy. There is an emphasis upon the role of high technology in product and process innovation across agrichemical inputs and food processing and manufacturing. In addition, the power of retailing and private governance over consumption, the environment, health, and a broader understanding of health and culture are emerging key features of the contemporary European food system. If, historically, EU food policy has centered on agriculture and production, today it needs to address not only retail logistics but also culture. The public health challenges and costs across Europe of diet related noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) are illustrated by the rising incidence of obesity.4 All these issues demand new public health thinking and new integrated policy responses.

THE EUROPEAN UNION AND THE EUROPEAN FOOD SYSTEM: COMPETING POLICY IMPERATIVES
The EU emerged from the ruins of World War II, reflecting both the new political realities and urgent economic, social, and food production challenges. The first European response, however, did not occur in agriculture but in the smokestack industries. The European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), ostensibly a trade body, established a number of political institutions within its founding treaty (the 1951 Treaty of Paris) whose form would radically develop over the next 5 decades. The original 6 (Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, and West Germany) were to expand to 12 members in 1990 and to 27 by January 2007. (The European Union is composed of 27 states, described as, with some geographical license, the EU15 of Western Europe: Austria [AT], Belgium [BE], Denmark [DK], Finland [FI], France [FR], Germany [DE], Greece [GR], Ireland [IE], Italy [IT], Luxembourg [LU], The Netherlands [NL], Portugal [PT], Spain [ES], Sweden [SE], the United Kingdom [UK]; and the EU 12 of Central and Eastern Europe: Cyprus [CY], Czech Republic [CZ], Estonia [EE], Hungary [HU], Latvia [LV], Lithuania [LT], Malta [MT], Poland [PL], Slovakia [SK], Slovenia [SI], Bulgaria [BG], and Romania [RO].)

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From these unlikely roots the European Unionthe arrangement that superseded the European Community in 1987is now the worlds largest, and certainly most complex, economic and political entity. The EU today is not a state, however, but rather an institutional repository of the collective economic, legal, and political power of its member nations on a range of important issues (the EU term is competence), these being decided by treaty and applied through the legislative forms of regulations, directives, and decisions (or soft law) formulated by its administrative arm, the European Commission. Formal executive decision-making comes from the European Council, the formal meetings of ministers from the member states underlining the intergovernmental dimensions of these procedures. Decision-making processes ultimately rest with the ministers but involve both the commission and the directly elected European parliament to differing degrees depending upon the treaty conditions of the issues being legislated. Yet, the polity-like features of the EU mean that it has a key policy-making role in shaping the workings of the food system across Europe. By virtue of its size and strategic position, the EUs policy-making role has become almost as important globally as it has for EU citizens. This point particularly applies to economic regulations and standard setting and for a lesser degree for economic and social legislation. Enlargement aside, the socioeconomic climate of the EU is significantly different even from two decades ago. In the 1992 Amsterdam Treaty, one of its regular revisions to the founding (1957) Treaty of Rome, health entered into the commissions competencies. Environmental concerns had entered a decade earlier. Thus, today, crucial issues facing humanitylet alone food systemssuch as climate change, loss of biological diversity, and environmental degradation, are now heavily shaped and addressed at a European level. Powerful founding member states such as Germany, Italy, and France, let alone new ones such as Bulgaria and Romania, now have to temper national policies in this European forum. These social, health, and environmental interestscore to the global vision of sustainable development since the 1987 Brundtland Commission and the 1992 Rio Declaration (considered later)sit alongside (and often conflict with) fundamental economic policy concerns about competitiveness and living standards. The current sixth EU Environmental Action Plan (adopted in 2002 by the European Parliament and European Council) focuses on the priority areas of climate change, nature and biodiversity, natural resources and waste, environment and health, and quality of life. This remains a set of goals and aspirations, however, and does not have any legislative authority.

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In recent decades, European integration has been driven by the moves toward a single market and the implied economic benefits from an ever larger free trade area. Concomitant to the attention to economic development has been the promotion of the European Social Model to ensure employment rights and other social benefits to EU citizens from this economic prosperity.5 In the face of increasing global economic activity, EU policy-makers have also sought to promote the competitiveness of European industries, particularly through new technologies. This policy priority was at the heart of the EU Council of Ministers agreed Lisbon Strategy in 2000 designed to stimulate renewed economic growth. In the agri-food sector there has been a recurrent promotion of the application of new technologies to the food system, from biotechnology and genetic modification (GMOs) in the 1980s to the current industry-led European Technology Platforms Food for Life Strategy, which embraces life sciencesbased nutrition through functional foods and personalized health solutions.6,7 The food system, as it is conceptualized here, embraces the full length of the food chain and its interactions in its wider socioeconomic and environmental settings where different economic interests and their capital interrelate and seek to shape the inputs and outputs of the food chain. Policy-makers must deal with these socioeconomic complexities, including the cultural dimensions of consumption, the short- and long-term public health considerations of consumption and different nationally and regionally situated consumers. The European food system can be viewed as a politically wrought and evolving geographical entitytogether with a range of agricultures and farming enterprises covering the extremes of agricultural practice. Hence, the European food system must be seen as a political and policy manifestation as well as a site of social and cultural, economic, and environmental relationships.

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EUROPEAN AGRICULTURE AND THE COMMON AGRICULTURAL POLICY

In large part due to the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), the EU today is the worlds largest exporter of agricultural products, taking around one quarter of global agricultural exportsalthough exports are almost balanced by the value of imports. The EUs 27 member countries employ 182 of their 433 million hectares for agriculture, or 42% of the total area.8 If farming remains a critically important industry to Europe a shrinking proportion of Europes population actually works on the landranging

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from less than 1% in the UK to 18.7% in Lithuania. As might be expected, the range of farming types, scale, and methods varies considerably, from low-technology, low-intensity methods among the newest EU members such as Romania and Bulgariawhose GDPs constitute one third of the EU averageto the high-intensity, high-output agriculture of rich northern states like The Netherlands and Denmark and parts of Greece and Spain. In contrast, only a small, though increasing, part of EU farm land is farmed organically (for the EU-25 3.6% in 2003) although as much as one quarter of farmland is managed extensively.8 The importance of agriculture is also indicated by the EU budget afforded to it. Each year around 43 billion ($US63 billion; 1=$1.47), around 34% of the total budget of the EU, is spent as agricultural policies through the CAP, and a further 12.4 billion ($US18.05 billion) is spent on rural development. The roots of the CAP lie in the post-WWII food shortages and the efforts of the 6 members of the ECSC to promote a viable agricultural sector and stable supplies of affordable food. Formed through the Treaty of Rome, the CAP offered subsidies and guaranteed prices to farmers and provided incentives to modernize and to re-equip.9 Despite later criticisms, in one key respect the CAP was enormously successful, moving the EU from insufficiency to self-sufficiency for many commodities. The economic beneficiaries of CAP supports were not only farmers but the agricultural input industries, not least the large European agri-chemical industries. Also, the first-stage processors benefited, such as the sugarcane processors from subsidy and export supports. But the success of the CAP was double-edged. By the 1980s, the CAP subsidies and supports for intensive farming, which at one point composed almost half the EU budget, produced large commodity surpluses, some of which were exported, others of which were stored or given away. Wheat production, for example, had roughly tripled since the early 1960s.8 Not only was this approach wasteful, costly, and unpopular, it weakened the economic position of farmers in developing countries, who, in conditions of falling global commodity prices, saw their share of world trade plummet.10 In many respects, the criticisms that were later made of US farm bills that subsidies drove down the price of key commodities, resulting in the ubiquitous use of low-priced commodities for food processing, and that less healthy foods, alongside meat, became cheaper and fruit and vegetables more costly11had already been apparent in Europe. By the mid-1980s, questions were also being raised about the environmental consequences of the intensive farming systems that the CAP had spawned.12 The longterm public health consequences were given scant consideration.

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While the environmental dimensions of intensive farming were present before the CAP, arguably, the CAP exacerbated them. Synthetic chemicals were introduced to farming from the 1940s but it was not until several decades laterwith their use almost universal across the farm sector that evidence on drinking water contamination; adverse affects on bird, animal, and insect ecology; and health risks posed by pesticide residues began to mount.13,14 Such harm to habitat and ecology has been associated with the intensification and specialization of agricultural systems and practices linked to increased external inputs (nutrients and pesticides), a decline in habitats, and less variability in landscape.15 Following the McSharry reforms of 1992, the CAP began to shift away from production supports. In the first instance, supports were substituted by direct payments to farmers and quota limits on some commodities, and a small but important range of agri-environment protection schemes were supported. In the wake of BSE (mad cow disease), the EU introduced closer regulatory scrutiny of the supply chain to promote animal health, improved food safety, traceability, and reduced food risks.16 The decoupling of supports for agriculture from production underpinned the most recent and extensive CAP reforms in 2003. The core of the reform is a single-payment scheme whereby farmers are paid for the provision of agreed public goods. In general terms, this means the maintenance of agricultural land, including permanent pasture, in good agricultural and environmental condition. Payment support is dependent upon cross-compliance with a range of regulations covering environmental protection, animal and plant health, animal welfare, and food safety. The reforms allow member states some discretion in how they phase out existing production supports up until 2013, creating considerable national differentiation within this common policy framework.17 The reforms are seen as compliant with permitted supports under the WTOs agriculture rules, being depicted as non or minimally trade distorting and fit the European policy position that agriculture and farming play a multifunctional role covering public goods such as the protection of the environment, and the sustained vitality of rural communities, food safety and other consumer concerns.18 The next policy challenge is to prove the value of these public goods provisions as the lead up begins to the major EU budget reforms scheduled for 2013. This policy terrain is highly complex. But policy complexity, says William Legg of the OECD, hides one basic, long-term environmental question: whether agricultural activities can efficiently and profitably produce food to meet growing world demand without degrading productive

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soils, clean and sufficient supplies of water, biodiversity and attractive landscape.19 This question might seem fundamental to the European farming system and not only Europe but worldwide. But this question deals with natural ecology alone and leaves out human ecology; arguably, one cannot be considered in the absence of the other. If agriculture has only addressed questions of natural ecology in recent decades, other parts of the food industry have only just begun to do so.20 How does human ecology appear within this changing policy context? The model of health built into the CAP was that good health required sufficiency of food. This was true in times of post-war reconstruction, but today the challenges are different: quality, diversity, ecology, social justice, food cultures, long-term human healthas well as price, security, and sufficiency. Sustainable development remains a worthy goal but the path to achieving it takes it through a hideously complex policy environment.

SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT AND ECOLOGICAL PUBLIC HEALTH

Sustainable development (SD) is about setting the policy context for the future. The term first came to prominence in the 1987 report Our Common Future.21 Five years later the Rio Earth Summit led to the elaboration of Agenda 21a framework for development seen in social, economic, and environmental terms, and the formation of the UN Commission on Sustainable Development (UNCSD). SDs constituent elementstaking the long view of societal development, the conservation of biodiversity, the promotion of intragenerational and intergenerational equity, attention to the risk of irreversible environmental consequenceshave become better understood over time, but it remains that the term lacks clarity and crucially, in the public mindor a focus on the here and now. Nevertheless, EU ambitions around SD extend far beyond the environmental effects of production into supply-side effects and the consequences of rising consumption. New concerns focus on the health and cultural implications of the food supply chain, and it has been suggested that Europe is witnessing an approaching climax in arguments around a broader focus on the environment, health, and social justice in food.22 There are a variety of methodologies for auditing the changing policy environment, in particular health impact assessment (HIA) and environmental impact assessment (EIA). However, such assessments are seen as

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difficult, expensive, and time consuming, as HIAs and EIAs are usually conducted separately. In the case of the CAP, only one health impact assessment has been carried out in the 5 decades since its formulation.23 In any case, HIAs and EIAs often leave out the cultural dimension. There may be a case, therefore, for an additional, more conceptual approach that gives explicit attention to environmental, social, and health factors. This addresses complexity and interdimensionality but aims for simplicity and coherence while addressing policy context and policy formulation. Reworking ecological concepts in public health is an attempt to achieve this aim. The term ecological public health extends Haeckels (1866) invention of the term ecology (eco + logos) beyond its original meaning in evolutionary biology24 to the material and societal determinants of health. The notion of rebuilding public health on ecological lines (often termed the social ecological model) is of course not new. It has already gained favor, being advanced by the Institute of Medicine in the United States25 and forming much of the conceptual foundations for the World Health Organizations Commission on the Social Determinants of Health. It has been argued that this renewed interest in ecological perspectives may be due to the mounting recognition of the complexity of public health problems, dissatisfaction with individualistic perspectives and with linear and mechanistic thinking, growing understanding of the impact of inequalities, and increasing understanding of context and environmental influences.26 However, the problem of applying ecological thinking in public health hitherto is that it has suffered from a degree of woolliness: acknowledging complexity only to be defeated by it. A second problem is identified by how ecology in public health is defined: as social ecology. Haeckels original formulation spoke to the world of nature, whereas social ecology (and the varying traditions in sociology and psychology) addresses complex social influences and relationships. Sometimes the natural or physical environment plays a role but it is not central. What looking at agriculture, food, and consumption suggests is that any reformulation of an ecological model in public health must offer a much stronger basis in natural ecology, a means for grounding the complex interdimensionality of health determinants in a clearer and simpler conceptualization, and a means of grounding inquiry in practical politics and policy-making.3 Ecological public health, in our model, aims to provide a means for sharpening arguments in public policy in two ways: first by addressing natural and human ecology together, acknowledging their separateness but also their crossovers, and through the construction of a simplifying

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mechanism to address complexity. The simplifying mechanism identified is the process of testing or auditing both policy contexts and policies strategies through the 4 domains that represent the fundamental parameters of human life, these being the: Material or physical world. The world of nature and transformed naturethe built environment, urbanizationand the extractive relationship with the environment; i.e., nature as the reserve on which existence draws. Physiological world. The importance of the bodily processes that transform foodnot just calories but micronutrients toointo bodily manifestation. Social world. The systematical organization of human relationships and all the societal institutions and interactions that frame how humans live. Cognitive world, or lifeworld. The interpretive structures within the human mind that are necessarily personally experienced and yet have meanings that others may share. The approach may appear at first overly conceptual. Its arguable merit is that it forces the analyst to assess policy-making within the combined overall framework of nature and society. Conversely, what it suggests, in relation to a perspective on food systems, is that no one part of the system can be left out or ignored, that social structures matter and that human understandings of factors that determine health also matter. A further dimension of the approach is the effort to comprehend the dynamic and evolutionary character of the food system, which might be found, for example, in the shifting nature of social institutions (state structures, organizations, markets) and the struggles within or between institutions or organizations, often resulting in changing lines of power. This approach is briefly applied in looking at the changing food system.

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FOOD BEYOND FARMING: THE INDUSTRIAL POWER SHIFT

The CAP successfully sustained farm incomes, even in mounting conditions of relative oversupply, but the other parts of the food industry were not standing still. Across Europe, new forces in food manufacturing, retailing, and marketing were in evidence alongside technological

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changes in production and transport logistics. The result has been a power shift from primary producers to food manufacturers and retailerswith even wholesalers seeing an erosion of their position. An interpretation of this relative shift is given in Table 1. This process might be described as a shift from producer-driven to buyer-driven supply chains. The concept of the value chain has been used to explain how value (profitability) has become increasingly captured by the buyer (toward the point of consumption) from the primary producer (the farmer/grower).28 However, there has been a further shift in the buyer-driven aspects in that the dominant position of food manufacturers has given way to the retailers and supermarkets, which have been able to dictate the terms of contracts and act as gatekeepers to (and by implication buyers for) the large majority of food consumers, thereby threatening the economic survival of noncompliant suppliers. One business analysis of current supply chains in Europe identified 600 supermarket formats and 110 buying desks acting as mediators for almost 90 million shoppers purchasing for a further 160 million consumers29 (see Figure 1). The power shift identified is represented as a continuum from primary producer to the mass purchasers of food, commodity traders, manufacturers, and large retailers. Even in 2003, when the EU was home to around 3.2 million farmers, power lay with retailers and their buying consortia. This is apparent despite the presence of some of the worlds largest food groups such as Nestl, the worlds largest food manufacturer, which is Swiss (although not an EU member), Unilever (Anglo-Dutch), Danone (French), and others.

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TABLE 1. Food industry: Power in the value-added chain

Period 1900 1900 1950 1960 1970 1980 2000s Farmers Dominant Declining Minor Very minor Manufacturers Minor Dominant Dominant Declining Wholesalers Major in a few trades Major in many trades Dominant Rapidly declining Retailers Very minor Minor Emerging Dominant Food Service Dominant Declining Latent Emerging

Source: adapted from von Schirach-Szmigiel.27

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FIGURE 1. Supermarket Buyer Concentration in the European Food Supply. (Source: Grievink).27

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In Europe there has been little restraint upon these trends. Competition and anti-monopoly policy and actions are weak and rare, respectively. Member states retain fierce and rhetorical political control over competition policy, although the EU is flexing its muscles in other economic arena, such as electronics. A staff paper of the European Commission has noted that the 9.7 million agricultural holdings (in the EU 25) are faced with pressure from the highly concentrated retail chains and with increased competition from third country products before arguing for support of producer organizations and increases in EU aid aimed at increasing childrens intake of fruit and vegetables.30 The EU policy reflex may be still to protect and nurture farming and even to consider production from its health effects, but its capacity to do so appears declining. The explanation for the failure to protect producers against retail chains is that EU competition law focuses not on supply chain relationships but solely on the consumer interest. The European Commission is more focused on the potential anti-competitive effects of corporate mergers and acquisitions upon markets, so intervention is more likely when the large grocery retailers seek to merge or acquire competitors.31 The higher degrees of grocery retail concentration are found within national markets rather than across the EU as a whole. In the UK, for example, Tesco has almost 32% of the grocery market, a higher proportion than Wal-Mart in its own domestic market (and outside the UK,

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Tesco has more stores in more countries). Furthermore, market power is not judged as vital a consumer issue compared to lower prices or expansion of product ranges. The supermarketisation of Europe is thus far judged a consumer gain. Only in France and the UK does market concentration obtain a higher profile. Social pressure is growing, not just because of market domination but unease at the implications of cultural domination, with arguments that retail giants are turning urban diversity into sameness.32 By the mid-2000s the big retailers, in the form of hypermarkets, supermarkets, and discounters dominated the Western European grocery retail markets and were taking an increasing share of the rapidly growing Eastern European markets. The leading European retailer (in terms of value) was Carrefour followed by Tesco. In Western Europe, the grocery retail value grew by about 20% between 1999 to 2006. In 1999 it was 890,496.4 m, and by 2006 1,064,288 m. In the same period, the percentage of retail value taken by the big retailers remained very large edging up from 68% to 72%. In Eastern Europe, by contrast, the grocery market retail value doubled between 1999 to 2006. In 1999 it was worth 87,332 m, and by 2006 it was 179,863 m. In the same period, the percentage of the retail value taken by big retailers also nearly doubled growing from 23.6% to 44.9%. The 2000s has seen a shift to supermarkets and hypermarkets and a decline in traditional outlets such as independent food stores, kiosks, and street markets, as Eastern Europelike other regions of the world follows the supermarket route.33 Within big retailing there are market leaders in terms of retail sales across Western and Eastern Europe, respectively. In Eastern Europe in 1999 the top 10 retailers controlled 13.2% of the market; in 2006, the top 10 retailers controlled just over 30% of the market. During this period, Eastern Europe was seen as the fastest growing region for grocery retailers. In an earlier analysis covering the period from 1999 to 2003, Bulgaria was identified as the fastest growing national market in the world.34 This degree of dominance will likely continue with many of the same companies having an increasing presence across the EU 27. The cross-European picture is more differentiated when we look at national markets. In the case of national market concentration by grocery retailers some earlier figures (from 2002) from consultants Cap-Gemini show that the degree of concentration varies country to country in Western Europe (see Table 2). The highest concentration is found in Sweden and the lowest in Greece and Italy.

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TABLE 2. Food retail top 3 market share (by Fascia) in selected western European countries 2002
Country No. 1 No. 2 No. 3 Combined Market Share (%) 95 83 78 64 58 57 52 44 32 32

Sweden The Netherlands Denmark France UK Germany Portugal Spain Italy Greece
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ICA Ahold FDB Carrefour Tesco Edeka Sonae Carrefour Coop Carrefour

OF Laurus Dansk Supermarkt Leclerc/Sys U Sainsbury Rewe JMR Eroski Group Conad Alfa Beta

Axfood Su Supergros Intermarch Asda Aldi Intermarch Auchan Carrefour Veropoulos

Source: Grievink.29

THE EUROPEAN DIETARY TRANSITION

While the European food system is undergoing remarkable change spreading eastwards, concentrating, globalizing, altering internal relations evidence for the food industrys impact on environment, health and social inequalities has mounted. The two EU discoursesone of economic efficiency and high technological innovation (competitiveness) and the other of environmental and social progress (sustainable development)are now in some tension: some argue that they are on collision course;35 others argue that new business models can accommodate both.36 At the member state and EU level, there is recognition that both goals will either have to be addressed by the powerful industrial and retail conglomerates or those combines will themselves become policy targets. Several frontlines are emerging in these food wars. One is easily identified from the earlier discussion: the environment. The shift in demand from local and seasonal toward imported, nonseasonal fruit and vegetables increases transportation, cooling, and freezing inputs, with a corresponding increase in energy. Greater processing of food leads to increased energy and material input and associated packaging waste. While energy in producing food has decreased, the environmental costs of acquiring food has risen, with greater use of cars required to source foods from supermarkets. The second frontline is cultural: the impact on European food traditions and consciousness about food. A study across 15 European countries has

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suggested that 3 core attributes, or types of approach, guide Europeans in the selection of food products37: Food as a source of pleasure and sensations (the epicurean or affective approach). Products are judged by taste, sight, smell, point of origin, trustworthiness of producer/retailer, etc. Food as a matter of price, convenience or ease of use (the rational or functional approach). Food as a consideration for health (the dietetic approach). These divergent approaches to food vary according to societal features (food cultures), demographic features (social class, gender, ethnicity), and economic factors (level of disposable income). Within families or groups, influences include personal or family history, position in life cycle, family status, and receptivity to the diffusion of new influences and new food choices or retail settings, potentially the most rapid changes in Europe being in the transition countries. The pleasure/sensation criteria appears more pronounced in those countries with a strong culinary traditionFrance, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Greece, Germanyand/or still close to traditional agriculturecountries of Central and Eastern Europe. The dietetic approach is present in all countries, but it is especially emphasized in Northern Europe in the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Ireland, particularly as it regards women. It is more widely present in countries where consumers seek to have a balanced dietfor instance, in Spain, where concerns about weight problems have increased, while the price criterion is much more present in lower middle social groups, as well as in Eastern European countries. Nevertheless, studies of what people are actually eatingrather than what they say about their eating or what styles of consumption they aspire tosuggest that there to be some convergence. In 1961, the proportion of energy derived from sugar varied considerably across Europe, and over the next 40 years sugar energy shares began to narrow. A similar story is told of fatty acid dietary composition and vegetables and fruit, albeit with still qualitative differences between type of fatty acid and level of fruit and vegetable consumption. While the main focus on greater similarity in EU diets is increased intakes in Mediterranean countries of saturated fats, cholesterol, and sugar, there have also been a reduction in the consumption of saturated fats and sugar, and an increase in fruit and vegetable consumption, in some Northern European countries.38 The dietary transition thesis can be found even in the heartland of the Mediterranean diet, Greece. A Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO)

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analyst has noted that with the exception of the high consumption of olive oil and of fresh fruit and vegetables, food consumption patterns in Greece have moved far away from this type of diet, still prevalent in the mid1960s.39 At that point, meat consumption was a mere 33 kg/person/year; 3 decades later it had increased to 88 kg/person/year. A similar story is told for other Mediterranean countries (Figure 2). Dietary transition and convergence is being shaped by trade, urbanization, common food marketing campaigns, foreign direct investment, improved transport infrastructure, and the dominance of supermarkets in the food supply chainsome of which apply broadly similar product ranges irrespective of country of operation.33 Food cultures once thought to be resilient appear to be changing fast in the face of such pressures. The third frontline is health. Dietary transition forms the backdrop to new noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) or avoidable chronic diseases. It triggered the analysis of the scientific link between diet and NCDs set out in the joint 2003 WHO and FAO review of evidence about diet, physical activity, and health.40 The driver for this collaboration between UN health and agricultural bodies was the recognition that the postWorld War II model of agriculture and health was in trouble. The shift of thinking came to a head in the WHOs Global Strategy on Diet, Physical Activity and Health (termed
FIGURE 2. Greece, Spain, Italy: Diet Transition to Increased Fat Consumption. (Source: Alexandratos).37

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DPAS), ratified by the World Health Assembly in 2004.41 Although new issues such as obesity garnered the headlines, the strategy represents the emergence of a new more complex understanding of foods role in health. How can these war zones be examined from an ecological public health perspective? The necessity of examining all four domains guides us away from any one domain approach and also forces us to consider the interdimensional knock-ons. For example, changes in food systemsoccurring in the social worldsuch as these new arrangements of retail supply and the push of new marketing practicescan act to shape the cognitive world, spreading new expectations about diet and informing new dietary habits. The highest rates of child obesity are today found in the parts of Europe once celebrated for their dietItaly, Spain, Greece, and Malta. This fact is underplayed within the emerging obesity strategies in Europe, which focus on individual choices (the cognitive world) rather the frameworks of choice (or determinants of choice) presented to individuals (the social world). Similarly, policies as sophisticated as the WHOs DPAS miss the dimension of the natural word (although physical activity is addressed). Modern food systems, based upon the overintensification of natural ecology, not only overproduce dietary components such as saturated fats and sugar, they also carry an awesome environmental burden, notably their use of oil and water. Indeed, there is some recognition at the policy margins that carbonCO2 overload is not unrelated to calorie oversupply. Certainly, the issue of obesity is troubling EU policymakers, as it is to member states.42 Rich countries, let alone poorer ones, see obesity as adding unnecessary financial, social, and health burdens in the future. Obesity is often presented as a marker for other NCDs.43 For years Europeans thought they were immune from the weight problems so evident in the United States.44 The International Obesity Task Force (IOTF) and the European Association for the Study of Obesity (EASO) have collected data showing that in many European countries more than half of all adults are overweight and up to one-quarter are clinically obese (www.iotf.org/ database/GlobalAdultAugust2005.asp).45 The point is that obesity is not merely an individual consumption phenomenon, or solely a matter of bodily energy imbalance, but a combination of factors with emerging systemic qualities of the social and natural worlds.43 Policies that are unwittingly partial or even consciously segmented cannot possibly address the breadth of factors and as a consequence will likely fail. Likewise, policies that consider problems affecting natural ecology without addressing the other domains fail to deliver the degree of policy integration or the requisite political or public awareness.

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MEETING THE CHALLENGES OF FOOD SUSTAINABILITY

Is it possible to discern an EU response to sustainability in the broad sense presented here? Might it rise to the cultural challengethat changes in diet are mass psychology issuesthe push of marketing and the pull of consumer vulnerabilitynot just supply chain ones? In large part how the EU addresses these issues will test which vision of Europe triumphs: economically lean and competitive economics or physiologically lean and ecologically sensitive population lifestyles. On one side, the EU promotes market transparency and competition; on the other side, the high ideal of planetary survival, the European social model, and improved levels of social protection. Two differing, but overlapping, pathways to meeting these complex challenges have emanated from the EU authorities, often in concert with industry and other stakeholders. The first approach reflects one current direction of EU policy response, which is characterized by a market-led and voluntary approach seeking industry support and compliance. The second one is direct regulatory intervention and rule-setting by the EU, although industry compliance is necessary for successful implementation. A third, alternative policy pathway, briefly explained below, posits that a more integrated and holistic policy approach that asks how to address solutions at source rather than at the end of chain needs to be developed and for which an ecological public health perspective can also offer help.

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Market Based Reforms and Food Sustainability: Private Governance, Voluntary Initiative, and Formal Regulation
In practice, technical panaceas are always available, some of which are thrown up by market actors themselves. One broad area of response to these supply chain and cultural challenges within the EU has been the use of market-led instruments to shape food supply sustainability and food consumption. The market-led response utilizes a combination of standards setting and accreditation, backed by audit and traceability, and labeling instruments that shift more responsibility to the consumer in the pursuit of policy goals. To a large extent, the private corporate managers of supply chains among the large food manufacturers and retailers have led this approach. Private governance of supply chains, as identified above, is a key component of the retailer dominance of the terms of trade along food supply chains as the buyers have imposed control and power over suppliers. Private governance has burgeoned from farm and food

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assurance schemes to segregation of genetically modified (GM) from non-GM food ingredients and from intervention and purchasing of organic foods to integrated pest and farm management protocols with growers, including international collaborative corporate-led standards such as the European Retailer Good Agricultural Practice standards (EUREPGAP) recently renamed GLOBALGAP to signify its reach. The large European food manufacturers, in turn, have also set up collaborative compliance schemes for suppliers such as the Sustainable Agriculture Initiative (SAI) platform created by Unilever, Danone, and Nestl in 2002.46 Also, under the banner of corporate social responsibility, individual corporations have adopted policies to address their environmental and health impacts. Manufacturers and retailers have a number of strategies available to them to reposition their product offerings and company image to bolster consumer trust and gain competitive advantage. These include: product reformulation, the creation of new better for you product ranges, commitment to carbon reductions, reduced packaging, commitments not to market to children, and other thematic areas. Companies have sought to turn concerns about health and the environment to their competitive advantage, launching new product ranges or repositioning old products in order to take advantage of perceived health benefits. The EU has collaborated with industry in promoting innovation through personal nutrition products and functional foods through the European Technology Platform for Food. At a global scale, at least in terms of company reports, such claims have been criticized as inadequate.47 At the European level, a review of the commitments given to the EU Platform on Diet, Physical Activity and Health observed that the quality score of these [evaluation] forms was 2.88 (out of 5) . . . on average, the monitoring forms fall just short of an adequate standard.48 For the European Commission and for many member states, industry-led initiatives addressing food sustainability are practical routes to realizing policy results; the heavy lifting is done by the private sector while the use of voluntary agreements also seeks to offer a carrot to industry to act while having the threat of the stick, that is, formal regulation, in reserve. For example, the European Commission, after establishing the EU Platform on Diet, Physical Activity and Health to encourage voluntary action from industry to address the ways in which their products contribute to obesity, announced that the food industry had one year to improve labeling on produce and to stop advertising junk food (e.g., products high in salt, fat, and sugar) to children.49 The stick has yet to make an appearance. Product labeling has been a favored instrument of both private governance and public regulators. The creation of the European Single

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Market from 1986 brought to the fore the need for new pan-European agreement on labeling, and this has been a policy instrument of choice by the European Commission ever since, both in terms of eco-labels (such as product energy efficiency) and GMO presence in food and feedwhere the enablement of consumer choice informs the regulatory method. In the more recent case of nutrition labeling, a standard format for EU nutrient labels exists but is only mandatory when a health claim for the food product is made. Most manufacturers and retailers use nutrient labeling but vary in how they present the information. To promote some consistency for health education purposes, some countries have experimented with national systems of nutrition approval. The UKs Food Standards Agency has introduced a traffic lights system, like the system adopted by Sweden, to indicate gradations of health approval, but while some suppliers have introduced this, the system has met considerable hostility from others, notably some large manufacturers (e.g., Cadbury Schweppes, Mars/Masterfoods, Danone, Kellogg, Kraft, Nestl, PepsiCo) and the largest UK grocery retailer (Tesco), which prefers the system of Guideline Daily Amounts. In the area of food safety, on the other hand, the sense of crisis precipitated across the European market by the spread of BSE in cattle sparked off a wide-ranging period of both regulatory legislation (around food hygiene and principles of food law) and institutional reform including creating the European Food Safety Agency.50 Yet, while dealing with BSE was expensive in the short term, obesity is of far greater economic impact in the long term. Consequently, the EUs response to the food industry is composed of many parts, not all of which are well integrated; some, while starting out as positive, jar against other EU policies to stimulate more open markets through deregulation.44 The labeling issues have yet to be fully played out and in terms of child obesity the final approach has yet to be determined. Most Europeans (85%) feel that public authorities should play a stronger role in fighting obesity, while 9 out of 10 Europeans feel that marketing and advertising influence children in their food and drink choices;51 however, other opinion poll surveys suggest that the responsibility for obesity lies overwhelmingly with families.52 The likely policy mix suggests elements of policy directed at parental behavior and responsibility and more upstream attempts to tweak the determinants of obesity. A further carrot that the EU offers its food producers is support for growing and processing food and feed. Recent reforms have offered financial support for creating and maintaining public goods. However, there remains a disjuncture between the public health effects of the types of food produced through support regimes and the food choices that will enable a healthy

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European citizenry. The public health and diet-related contribution of fruits and vegetables, for example, appear to remain outside the identified range of public goods for agriculture according to current EU thinking.53

CONCLUSION
Over several decades, the EU and member states have given far greater attention to the environmental and health consequences of agriculture, removing incentives to overproduction and establishing new mechanisms to promote food safety, often following in the wake of heightened consumer concern. While the new policy rhetoric around sustainable development is powerful, the task of maintaining measurable change across the EUs 27 nations is immense and is in competition with pressures from industry and the competitiveness drive being fostered across the EU. The temptation to use private mechanisms in place of public regulation remains strong. In looking at policy formation, we have suggested that our formulation of ecological public health approach can help to simplify the high complexity and interdimensionality of food systems. The approach presented does appear abstract, but underlying the application of this perspective are some simple principles. If the environment is not nurtured, it cannot yield wholesome food. On the other hand, if the food is not produced, processed, and distributed equitably, and if food cultures are irrevocably damaged by product marketing, it becomes a vehicle for social discord, inequality, and worsening patterns of health. Europes dilemma is all too common: how to balance food production for large populations accustomed to unparalleled choice and cheapness with sustainability in both natural and human-ecological termsmanaging supply chains (including their psycho-social dimensions) in a manner that enables both them and the earth to sustain future generations. We have argued that the EU has given attention to the environmental consequences of food productionalthough ample environmental and ecological challenges still remainand it has been far less focused on the environmental or health consequences of food manufacturing and retailing, while its promotion of open marketswhich now visibly tend to a concentration of power, combined with a narrow understanding of the consumer interesthas taken matters in a different direction. As governments and the public look on with horror at mounting levels of child obesity across Europe, the growing environmental and public health

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consequences of the entire food system need to be more closely examined. Progressive Europeansand the EU itselfclaim to offer to the world an image of a sustainable, secure, and fair vision of the future. If the modern European project is able to deliver this bargain, it will be worthy of mass support and potentially emulation by other parts of the world. If it fails, the political, let alone environmental and social, consequences will be major.

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