I appreciate Professor Thomson’s generous review of On Feeding the Masses and find illuminating his concluding questions on the political ramifications of food safety failures and the limited capacity of developing countries to address their agricultural challenges.
Admittedly, my book’s study of the politics of food safety is decidedly narrow, highlighting the bureaucratic and technocratic conflicts in standard setting, planning, and supply chain management, rather than assessing the broader contentious politics between state and society on account of failed food policies. Other studies have examined how food safety failures have led to declines in trust in both central and local governments, fomented social unrest, and spawned social movements. In China, provided protests are targeted toward local food safety scandals, the central government has been quite tolerant. Some scholars note that the central government may even view these protests as an important source of information on potential local government malfeasance. However, if protests escalate beyond a locality, the national government is quick to suppress the unrest. Short of heading to the streets, individuals can channel their food safety concerns to the government via NGO-led advocacy, media reporting, and open governance initiatives that broadly fall under the umbrella of consultative authoritarianism.
Thomson also raises an important question as to how the issue of food safety relates to other contentious issues in agricultural politics. In the Chinese context, land disputes, environmental degradation, and labor conflict are the primary drivers of social unrest. Rising food prices are also a concern for the Chinese party-state, but the government has been careful to stabilize prices and boost its food supply through special mechanisms, such as the strategic pork reserve. In general, food safety is a less explosive but more simmering issue and can still have a serious effect on trust relations, with consequences for regime legitimacy. But aside from major scandals, food safety alone is unlikely to be the direct cause of a regime crisis. Moreover, the political salience of food safety seems to track closely with development, such that food contamination is more threatening to regimes with increasingly urban, affluent, and educated populations. In a developing context, state price interventions are more likely to be the proximate cause of unrest, given their potential policy externalities.
The interconnectedness of agrarian policy issues is the reason that agricultural problems such as food safety are particularly vexing and is likely why, as Thomson observes, addressing them requires “significant infrastructural power” on the part of the state. The solution for China’s food safety woes requires far more than a shift in its regulatory governance; also needed are concurrent reforms in land policy, social welfare, and agricultural policy. As I have noted elsewhere, improvements in food safety hinge on modernizing agriculture, which requires new land reforms and a functioning rural welfare program to address the displacement of millions of small farmers. Any long-lasting institutionalized approach must necessarily balance these developmental prerogatives. A major goal of my book was to ask the broader question of how scale exacerbates these policy trade-offs and to explore how policy conflicts across levels of government can lead to regulatory failure. Thomson does pick up on the “sobering” tone of my assessment of agricultural policy in China, but I do remain optimistic that China’s enterprising bureaucrats may develop an innovative institutional solution to addressing its scale problem.
