Melbourne Law School - Research Publications
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ItemNo Preview AvailableConsumer Choice as a Pathway to Food Diversity: A Case Study of Açaí Berry Product Labelling(Springer International Publishing, 2018)Forest lands and the rich social and ecological diversity contained within are being lost as demand for agriculture land expands globally. During this process traditional cultivation practices are marginalised resulting in a loss of dietary diversity. As Vira et al. observe 'Despite the huge potential of forest and tree foods to contribute to diets, knowledge on many forest foods, especially wild foods, is rapidly being lost because of social change and modernisation' . Forest loss coupled with the associated declines in dietary diversity and traditional knowledge are a threat to the human right to food. This right requires diverse food production systems that are sustainable, support livelihoods (especially those who are most marginalised) and meet nutritional needs. This chapter explores the exporting and labelling of a traditional food source the "acai berry" and examines whether the production and sale of acai has the potential to improve food diversity.
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ItemAn Ecological Approach to Regulatory Studies?(Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, 2018)Regulatory studies has been mainly occupied with addressing the social and economic crises of contemporary capitalism through instrumentally and responsively rational approaches. This article asks how regulatory scholarship can better respond to the ecological crisis now facing our world and our governance systems alongside social and economic crises. There are both possibilities and problems with instrumentally rational regulatory approaches that see human ecological impact as an externality or market failure and socio-legal approaches to regulatory studies that emphasize the need to attend to the social and political aspects of regulation using a responsively rational approach. A third big shift towards an ecologically rational approach to regulatory studies is needed to comprehend our embeddedness within ecological systems. An ecologically rational approach also calls for an understanding of how multiple, diverse ways of sustainable being can intersect with and challenge current regulatory regimes dominated by an instrumentally rational approach.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableCan Ethical Labelling Make Food Systems Healthy, Sustainable, and Just?( 2019)Consumers are often encouraged to “vote with their fork” and “say no” to unhealthy, unsustainable and unfair food. Food packaging is typically littered with claims about the nutrition, ethics and social goods associated with the product inside. Claims like “organic”, “GMO free”, “fair trade”, and “anti-biotic free” are common. But can consumer preference base labelling make a difference to the health, sustainability and ethics challenges facing the food system?
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ItemConsumer Power to Change the Food System? A Critical Reading of Food Labels as Governance Spaces: The Case of Agai Berry Superfoods(University of Arkansas, School of Law, 2019)This article argues that the marketing claims on food labels are a governance space worthy of critical examination. We use a case study of superfood agai berry products to illustrate how marketing claims on food labels encapsulate dominant neoliberal constructions of global food systems. These marketing claims implicitly promise that by making careful choices consumers can resist and redress the ravages of unbridled global capitalism.
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ItemSUSTAINABLE HEALTHY FOOD CHOICES: THE PROMISE OF 'HOLISTIC' DIETARY GUIDELINES AS A NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL POLICY SPRINGBOARD(QUEENSLAND UNIV TECHNOLOGY, 2018)A healthy diet is generally a sustainable diet. This point is illustrated in the large body of work exploring the interconnections between public health nutrition and environmental issues associated with food choices. Unhealthy diets and their contribution to diet-related noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) are receiving growing attention from international and national policy-makers. Dietary guidelines that inform consumers about food choices and that shape policy actions to enable choices in line with the guidelines are foundational to both national and international responses to diet-related NCDs. The purpose of this paper is to argue for holistic dietary guidelines as part of national and international policy responses to diet-related NCDs. Holistic dietary guidelines simultaneously address health and environmental sustainability to address common causes and harness synergistic solutions. They are based on evidence, and free of conflicts of interest. Moreover, they act as a policy springboard for effective regulatory action to change the food environment and not just as an education tool. Holistic dietary guidelines raise potential concerns under international trade and investment law, for example, to the extent that such guidelines promote local products as a means of supporting both nutritional and environmental health. These issues will be examined in more depth in a second paper in this special issue that follows on from this one.
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ItemA Public Appetite for Poultry Welfare Regulation Reform: Why Higher Welfare Labelling is not Enough(Sage Publications, 2018)This article argues that the growth of free-range labelled egg and chicken shows that the public wish to buy foods produced via higher welfare standards. It summarises the main reasons for dissatisfaction with the current regulation of animal welfare standards in Australia and shows that labelling for consumer choice is not enough to address public concerns. It critically evaluates the degree to which recently proposed new animal welfare standards and guidelines for poultry would address these problems and concludes that the new standards are not sufficient and that more responsive, effective and independent government regulation of animal welfare is required.
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ItemThe Meat in the Sandwich: Welfare Labelling and the Governance of Meat-chicken Production in Australia(Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, 2018)This article critically examines the degree to which higher-animal welfare label claims change animal welfare regulation and governance within intense meat-chicken ('broiler') production in Australia. It argues that ethical labelling claims on food and other products can be seen as a 'governance space' in which various government, industry and civil society actors compete and collaborate for regulatory impact. It concludes that ethical labelling can act as a pathway for re-embedding social concerns in the market, but only when it prompts changes that become enshrined in standard practice and possibly the law itself. Moreover, the changes wrought by ethical labelling are small and incremental. Nevertheless, labelling may create ongoing productive tension and 'overflow' that challenges the market to listen to and accommodate actors (including animals) on the margins to create ongoing incremental changes.
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ItemFrom Food Chains to Food Webs: Regulating Capitalist Production and Consumption in the Food System(Annual Reviews, 2019)This review addresses food as a topic of sociolegal studies. We show that the divide between production and consumption in law and social science is increasingly untenable in the context of contemporary globalizing, industrializing food chains underpinned by a productivist ideology and supported by a consumptogenic cultural economy. Sociolegal studies of food are well-suited to grappling with the complexity of production–consumption dynamics through regulatory governance studies of hybridized (public and private) supply chain standards. Yet we argue for an expanded focus on the embeddedness of food chains in social, political, and, importantly, ecological food webs. We suggest that sociolegal studies into ecologically based regulation, countermovements, and an expansive version of the human right to food (that includes nature and animals) can particularly contribute to an understanding of the possibilities regulating capitalism by seeking to constrain globalizing, industrialized food chains.
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ItemThe Consumer Labelling Turn in Farmed Animal Welfare Politics: From the Margins of Animal Advocacy to Mainstream Supermarket Shelves(Routledge, 2019)“Free range” and other higher welfare label claims are increasingly visible on Australian egg, pork and chicken meat products. This paper critically examines the way in which these claims have shifted animal welfare concerns from the “margins” of the animal advocacy movement to the “mainstream” of everyday consumer choice. It asks what has been lost and what gained as mainstream producers and retailers have adopted these label claims. The chapter argues that the growing market share of higher welfare labelled foods and the increasing public discussion and contestation of the meaning of terms such as “free range”, “free to roam” and “bred free range” does represent the success of animal advocacy campaigns aimed at activating mainstream consumers to express their concern about animal welfare. At the same time label claims also exhibit the creativity of industry and retailers in appropriating and accommodating civil society critiques of dominant production and distribution systems by narrowing down the range of contested issues, and sentimentalising, simplifying and de-radicalising potential solutions. This indicates a governance gap - a chasm between what can be achieved via voluntary certification and labelling and the need for a more inclusive, sustainable and official government regulation of animal welfare.
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ItemThe Promise of Ecological Regulation: The Case of Intensive Meat(American Bar Association, 2018)Eating less intensive meat is a solution to many problems: to human and ecological health and to the intense cruelty visited upon the millions of intensively bred animals across the globe. This Article outlines the contribution regulation makes to this problem and how it might be part of the solution. It begins by summarizing why intensive meat production generates so many problems that cut across regulatory domains. It then shows how current forms of regulation fail to grapple with the intersecting harms generated by intensive meat, highlighting the need for an ecological makeover for regulation itself. Further, regulation, as an instrumental form of law and policy implementation, neglects the interconnected challenges of the whole system. Regulatory scholarship, in the form of responsive regulation, provides ways to overcome at least some of the social aspects of regulatory failure. Yet the Article shows, drawing on two brief case examples highlighting an instrumental and responsive regulatory approach, that the ecological weakness of regulation is often overlooked. Finally, the Article teases out the characteristics of ecologically responsive regulation that can contribute to lowering meat consumption and then examines nascent regulatory tools and strategies that could be refashioned to encourage a shift towards an ecologically rich and socially resilient future.