Food safety at the small scale: The case of meat inspection regulations in British Columbia's rural and remote communities

Food safety standards have become a contested policy and discursive terrain, often pitting regulations developed for an international, industrial food system against the practices of small-scale farmers. In the wake of the Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) crisis and other food scares, the provincial government in British Columbia (B.C.), Canada enacted a set of stringent meat inspection regulations that essentially eliminated small-scale abattoirs in 2004. The results of these regulations were devastating to small-scale farmers in rural and remote communities and in 2010 the BC government acted to mitigate these impacts by developing a training and licensing program for rural and remote regions. This paper traces this policy shift and government and industry attempts to ameliorate the adverse effects of the 2004 regulations. In developing this set of regulations, the Province recognized that there are differing levels of risk of food-borne illness for large and small-scale producers. Through interviews with farmers and Provincial stakeholders involved in the creation of this program, we suggest that this approach acknowledges alternative notions of risk and food safety that are more aligned with the practices of small-scale farmers in isolated places far from centralized processing facilities. However, while the introduction of Class D and E licenses has the potential to improve community food security and sovereignty, they have not entirely eliminated the structural barriers that local farmers experience in processing their own meat for sale. Thus, the creation of these licenses is only one aspect of a much larger approach to agricultural sustainability that must be enacted in order to preserve food production in rural and remote communities. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.