Adapting to food safety crises: Interpreting success and failure in the Canadian response to BSE

doi:10.1016/j.foodpol.2014.09.003

Food Policy

Volume 49, Part 1, December 2014, Pages 250-258

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodpol.2014.09.003 Get rights and content

Highlights

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Analysis of institutional learning in Canada’s food safety system following an outbreak of BSE.
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Implications for understanding recurrent risks within dominant production systems.
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Non-problematicity and the bounding of safety within food policy.

Abstract

This paper explores processes of adaptation to food safety crises, and raises questions about what can be understood as success and failure in a crisis response. It presents the outcomes of a qualitative research study of Canada’s beleaguered beef industry, and investigates institutional learning and adaptation following an outbreak of BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy) in particular. The analysis is guided by a concern with tensions between stability and change in adaptation. It draws on conceptual research on risk and the construction of non-problematicity as a means of symmetrically investigating how risk responses to BSE both opened up and closed down reflexive scrutiny of food and food safety systems. Specific attention is paid to constraints on adaptation imposed by preoccupations with market-led regulation, scientific risk analysis and the maintenance of institutional relations in the face of a potential public controversy. The paper concludes that in order to contend with recurrent crises in modern food-safety systems it is necessary to widen adaptive strategies, and to scrutinise agricultural priorities and food policy as essential aspects of adaptation.

Section snippets

Preface

This paper reports on research conducted into processes of institutional learning and adaptation in the face of long-term and endemic crises in the security of modern agri-food systems. More specifically, this paper provides a qualitative analysis of institutional adaptation following the emergence of BSE

The Canadian experience with BSE

The Canadian experience with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, or mad-cow disease) began in earnest in May 2003 with the identification of Canada’s first infected cow near Edmonton, Alberta.³ This was the same variant of the disease that had caused so much devastation to human, animal and rural life in Britain since

Towards reflexive adaptation in food safety policy

When food safety hazards emerge, institutions with responsibility for mitigating risks are inevitably drawn into the spotlight. Understanding the scope and focus of a risk and the boundaries within which institutions operate are necessary prerequisites for interpreting the ability to come to terms with complex social and dynamic risk scenarios, such as those posed by BSE. We thus turn our attention towards a consideration of dominant approaches to adaptation and their limits, before exploring

A case study in adaptation to BSE in Canada

In what follows we explore adaptation and the construction of the non-problem in reference to a qualitative research engagement involving a series of interviews with institutional actors involved in the management of food-safety in Canada, and of BSE in particular.⁹ Our research investigated the ways in which the disease created opportunities for learning and innovation in approaches to food safety.

Conclusion

Our intent has been to challenge how we measure, and even define, ‘success’ and ‘failure’ in adaptation to the risks associated with complex food systems by focusing on the outbreak of BSE in Canada. We have argued that evaluating how institutions have responded (or not) requires widening the boundaries around our interpretations of change. Importantly, this necessitates reviewing food safety systems in relation to a wider array of normative economic and political choices about the relationship

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