Food, consumer concerns, and trust: Food ethics for a globalizing market

The use of biotechnology in food production gives rise to consumer concerns. The term consumer concern is often used as a container notion. It includes concerns about food safety, environmental and animal welfare consequences of food production systems, and intrinsic moral objections against genetic modification. In order to create clarity a distinction between three different kinds of consumer concern is proposed. Consumer concerns can be seen as signs of loss of trust. Maintaining consumer trust asks for governmental action. Towards consumer concerns, governments seem to have limited possibilities for public policy. Under current WTO regulations designed to prevent trade disputes, governments can only limit their policies to 1) safety regulation based upon sound scientific evidence and 2) the stimulation of a system of product labeling. An analysis of trust, however, can show that if governments limit their efforts in this way, they will not do enough to avoid the types of consumer concerns that diminish trust. The establishment of a technical body for food safety - although perhaps necessary - is in itself not enough, because concerns that relate directly to food safety cannot be solved by pure science alone. And labeling can only be a good way to take consumer concerns seriously if these concerns are related to consumer autonomy. For consumer concerns that are linked to ideas about a good society, labeling can only provide a solution if it is seen as an addition to political action rather than as its substitution. Labeling can help consumers take up their political responsibility. As citizens, consumers have certain reasonable concerns that can justifiable influence the market. In a free-marker society, they are, as buyers, co-creators of the market, and societal steering is partly done by the market. Therefore, they need the information to co-create that market. The basis of labeling in these cases, however, is not the good life of the individual but the political responsibility people have in their role as participants in a free-market. Then, public concerns are taken seriously. Labeling in that case does not take away the possibilities of reaching political goals, but it adds a possibility.