Participation in Standard Setting for the Agro-food Industry

Public and private standards are two different governance systems for the global agro-food system. The public standards are set by so called three sisters, the Codex Alimentarius Commission, the World Organisation for Animal Health and International Plant Protection Convention. Private standards are set by a wide variety of private organisations. This chapter asks the question of where the different sets of standards gain their legitimacy from and focus on participation as a way to create legitimacy. It finds that the three international organisations provide more or less transparent procedure to set their standards but a democratically control or election of the experts in the drafting committees is missing. Additionally favours the institutional setup of the organisations some interests, especially less and least developed countries and small-scale producers have difficulties to get their voice heard. So there is room for improvement. Concerning private voluntary standards the findings are also that improvement is needed. Due to the variety of different voluntary private standards a single finding apart from the fact, that also these kind of standards are not set by democratically elected and controlled bodies. The standard-setting bodies differ widely between single corporations and multi-stakeholder-initiatives. The private voluntary standards system provides options that can create meaningful participation, in particular because it can tackle issues that the WTO does not regulate such as environmental and social aspects of production and allows procedures to bring all relevant stakeholders together. However, the voluntary private system has also some flaws, mainly that it depends on the willingness of powerful corporations to improve the participation in the system. In the end, I argue that both governance systems can complement each other, but much improvement is needed in both systems to come to well-functioning solution.