Capturing the meaning of “free range”: The contest between producers, supermarkets and consumers for the higher welfare egg label in Australia
Introduction
At the beginning of 2015, Australian federal and state consumer affairs ministers1 together announced the introduction of a mandatory new information standard for “free range” eggs. This long awaited regulatory clarification of the meaning of free range was originally intended to “enhance consumer confidence and certainty around egg labelling” and to “respond to growing consumer demand in the face of confusing and potentially false and misleading claims in the market” (CAF, 2015, p. 2). By the time the new standard was announced in March 2016, however, the objective had changed to incorporate both “giv[ing] more information to consumers” but also importantly, “reduc[ing] the regulatory uncertainty faced by egg producers and encourage[ing] investment in the industry” (CAF, 2016). To the disappointment of both consumer and animal welfare advocates, the new “free range” information standard enshrined a maximum outdoor stocking density of 10,000 hens per hectare (in comparison with the 1500 to 2500 hens per hectare that they had advocated) and provided only for “meaningful and regular access to the outdoors”, without specifying further conditions such as size and positioning of doors to the outside, conditions on the range, and opportunities for natural behaviours such as dust bathing, pecking and scratching (Bettles, 2016a, Choice, 2016).
This paper shows how the egg industry was able to shape the consumer law initiative, with the support of primary industries ministers, to define the meaning of “free range” eggs in accordance with existing, industrial-scale, barn-based free range production systems, rather than the smaller scale, outdoors-based systems preferred by consumer advocates and some other stakeholders.
Drawing on the concept of “regulatory space” (Hancher and Moran, 1998), we analyse how industry actors were able to “capture” the development of the consumer information standard (Goodfellow, 2016), even in an age of consumer challenge to primary industry power (Dixon, 2003, Roff, 2007), and with increasing public support for higher animal welfare standards (Chen, 2016).
Much food systems literature points out the significance of industry and corporate influence over food system governance (Lang and Heasman, 2015, Stucker and Nestle, 2012; Clapp, 2012). In Australia, the captured relationship between primary industries and Australian government has been particularly infuential. Yet we suggest that the egg industry's traditional “cozy” (Marangos, 2009) relationship with government and primary industries departments, while an important part of the story, is not the whole story. As Lang and Heasman (2015) point out, the retailers are the power brokers between consumers and industry in the contemporary food system. We suggest that it was the tacit alignment of the new free range standard with supermarket requirements that ultimately allowed the egg industry to maintain its preferred view of “free range” as industrial-scale free range.
The first section of this article outlines the background and policy context for the highly contested debate about “free range” eggs in Australia, showing how consumer demand and advocacy by civil society groups led to the opening of a “policy window” (Kingdon, 2011) or opportunity for change. The second section reviews the history of regulatory capture of animal welfare standards setting by primary industries in Australia in the context of literature on corporate influence over food system governance. We argue that the development of food labelling policy is a contested “regulatory space” in the contemporary retail dominated food system, and we outline our policy analytic framework for evaluating the influence of industry, government and civil society in the unfolding debate over the mandatory free range information standard. The third section goes on to describe the data and methodology used for this study.
The fourth section presents our findings. We show how a consumer advocacy group, Choice, opened the initial “policy window”, creating the opportunity for the free range standard. Yet, when a second policy window was opened through a consultation on the standard, the egg industry was able to establish an advocacy coalition (Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith, 1999) with primary industries ministers that successfully reframed the policy problem (Weiss, 1989) as one of industry (not consumer) uncertainty. Crucially, the proposal put forward by the egg industry coalition mirrored the requirements of the major Australian retailers. Thus the labelling reform process shifted from one originally intended to halt misleading “industrial” free range claims on egg cartons (The Treasury, 2015) to one that enshrined “industrial” free range as the regulatory standard for free range eggs. The final section discusses the implications of these findings and the possibility of further contestation and change in the future.
Section snippets
Contestation of “free range” egg labelling
Production systems labelled “free range” emerged in Australia in the 1980s in response to increasing consumer concern about animals being held in confinement (Parker et al., 2017; see also Miele, 2011). In some countries, notably the European Union (EU Council, 1999; see also NAWC, 2012, Mench et al., 2011), animal welfare concerns led to a ban on conventional cages. In Australia, by contrast, governments responded to industry lobbying and rejected a ban on conventional cages in 2000. Instead
Corporate power in food system governance
The highly concentrated nature of both Australia's egg industry and supermarket sector is consistent with the more general observation of corporate concentration of power across all sectors of the food system in recent decades (Lang and Heasman, 2015, Stucker and Nestle, 2012, Clapp, 2012). Increased market power has led to increased influence over the regulatory structures and institutions that govern the rules by which agrifood corporations operate (Clapp and Fuchs, 2009). Evidence has
Data collection
Data were collected from a range of policy documents related to the national information standard for free range egg labelling. Documents were collected from 2012 (when the ACCC rejected an application from the national egg industry body for certification for free range labelling), to March 2016, when federal and state consumer affairs ministers (the Consumer Affairs Forum) announced their preferred approach to the development of the national information standard. The documents included media
Results
A significant shift took place in the definition of the policy problem in defining free range eggs – from a problem of “consumer uncertainty” to a problem of “industry uncertainty” - through four key stages in the policy development process, described in each of the four subsections below. The announcement that a national information standard was to be prepared in response to Choice's super-complaint opened a policy window (section 5.1); and the release of the Consultation RIS defined the
Capturing the meaning of free range
The outcome of the policy process to develop Australia's national information standard for free range egg labelling has the hallmarks of a straightforward case of “regulatory capture” (Dal Bo, 2006). However, our analysis reveals a more complex story. The development of a food labelling policy is a highly contested “regulatory space”, and the outcomes of the policy process to develop a new standard will reflect the power relations between stakeholders within that space. The influence of the egg
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by a Discovery Grant from the Australian Research Council (Grant number DP 150102168).
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