Standardizers. The new private bureaucracy that controls the quality and food safety in global agricultural vale chains

Abstract

Global agri-food production is structured in chains controlled by big retailers. Private standards have become one of the most important forms of governance. Our objective is to analyze the institutional structure from which the quality and safety requirements and evaluation procedures are designed. Our hypothesis is that the power of big retailers increases thanks to the control of this institutional structure, which is called the Tripartite Standards Regime (Loconto and Busch, 2010). For this, this paper will analyze the private standards that predominate in one of the most important fruit and vegetable exporting regions in Europe, the Region of Murcia. It shows 3 characteristics of the Tripartite Regime of private standards of big retailers (Global GAP, IFS, BRC): hybridization of public and private in the field of regulation; bureaucratization through expert professionals, expertise and procedures from private actors; and control of large distributors over the entire standardization process.