Food safety and the political economy of food governance: the case of shrimp farming in Nam Dinh Province, Vietnam

Abstract

This contribution is a critique of the public and private governance models in response to the food safety crisis in Vietnam. Using shrimp farming in Nam Dinh province as a case study, the paper argues that public food governance has addressed some of the safety issues in the input sector but remains largely ineffective at the production level due to limited financial and human resources. In turn, private governance has had more successes but its impact is limited to the value-chain while food safety can be influenced by both sectoral and cross-sectoral production practices. In addition, it reinforces the subordination of direct producers by keeping them within industrial production, passing down the cost of safety compliance, and forcing them to assume production risks while reducing their profit margins. More importantly, safety governance under industrial farming is likely to open new opportunities for land expropriation and concentration, affecting the livelihood of small farmers and potentially leading to political unrest. The essay thus asserts that food safety needs to be addressed under the integrated framework of Food Sovereignty, which seeks to obtain food quality, including safety together with agroecological production, farmers' control of productive resources and the enabling of local trading systems.

Keywords:

• industrial agriculture
• food governance
• food safety
• shrimp
• Vietnam

Notes

¹Friedmann and McNair (2008) identify another form of governance initiated from below by the Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity. The movement aims not only to raise the quality and safety of food but also to highlight the cultural and regional characteristics of food, which could represent an alternative to the ‘supermarket-led agrifood capitals’ regime. To date, however, the Slow Food movement has no presence in the cases studied in this paper which would allow for closer examination in that context.

²The Xuan Thuy National Park has a mandate of protecting the Park's core area, but also manages developments that are deemed sustainable in the buffer zone, which includes Giao An and four other communes. Through its various projects, the Park has contributed to a number of infrastructure investments in the buffer zone and is therefore an important actor in the development of Giao An and its neighbouring communes.

³1 USD is equal to about 20,000 dong.

⁴The Codex Alimentarius has been developed by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Health Organization (WHO) to provide international standards on food safety (Ragasa 2008, 3). The GAP in turn was developed initially by a group of retailers to provide a harmonized set of guidelines, ‘addressing consumer concerns towards food safety, environmental sustainability and labour welfare, in addition to reducing costs for producers by providing a single set of standards accepted by a wide range of retailers’ (Corsin et al. 2007, 55; see also APEC 2006, 15).

⁵There has been no opportunity to directly investigate safety practices by this company during field research. Information on this issue comes from interviews with the company Director and Vice Director.

⁶In February 2012, the newspaper Tuoi Tre reported a similar reaction by fruit producers in the Mekong Delta who decided to withdraw from GAP as they had to assume the cost of compliance. Despite being small relative to production costs, this was still perceived as bringing few benefits and lower profits (Tuoi Tre Newspaper 2012).

⁷Hall (2011) observed that the booming of a number of export crops, including shrimp, in Southeast Asia has led to land grabbing and exacerbated inequalities.

Additional information

Tran Thi Thu Trang works on Vietnam's rural transformation under market reforms and globalization, including issues of social differentiation, local politics, peasant resistance, and food safety and sovereignty. Email: [email protected]