Public and private incentives to adopt enhanced food safety controls

The remainder of the paper outlines the environment in which food safety regulation is evolving across public and private spheres and the implications for the governance of food safety. [...] It is argued that, while it is helpful to think about firm-level decisions regarding food safety controls in terms of the associated private costs and benefits, which is the traditional mantra of the economist, the ability of business decision-makers to assess the implications of the various options they face is less than perfect, while a range of non-economic factors curtail the choices that are [...] Indeed, the firm-level impact of improvements in food safety controls can be regarded as comparable to adoption of any new technology, with the expected change in firm profitability dependent on the characteristics of the firm, the number of other adopters and the firm‟s position in the order of adoption among its competitors (KARSHENAS, STONEMAN 1993. [...] In the arena of food safety we are seeing the evolution of collective food safety standards at the regional and international levels, most notably the good agricultural practice (GAP) standard of the Euro- Retailer Produce Working Group (EurepGAP/GlobalGAP) and the benchmarking of national and regional private collective food safety standards, such as the BRC and IFS standards, through the GFSI. [...] The 1990 Food Safety Act in the UK was a major factor motivating the initial evolution of private business-to-business food safety standards by a number of multiple food retailers (HENSON, NORTHEN 1998) and the eventual promulgation of the collective BRC Global Standard (HENSON, 2006).