Agri-Food Network Seminar on Ethical Consumption October 2005 Ethical traceability and the UK wheat-flour-bread chain Department of Food Policy City University Professor Tim Lang Dr David Barling Rosalind Sharpe r.p.sharpe@city.ac.uk
About the project The aim of the project is to develop the concept of food ethical traceability as the basis for consumers informed choice. By ethical traceability we mean the application of traceability systems to the processes and attributes of ethical food production. The project is funded by the Sixth Framework Programme of the EU and runs from May 2004 to October 2006. There will be a final report and conference to disseminate the findings. The work has two interlinked strands, one philosophical and one practical: Three groups of philosophers in the Netherlands, Denmark and Italy are looking at how food ethics fit into the wider framework of philosophy. They are exploring, for example, where ethical traceability sits in relation to notions of the right and the good, and at how traceability can highlight areas of ethical room for manoeuvre within food chains. Three other groups are looking at three separate food chains to see what role ethical concerns currently play in the process, and what opportunities there might be for change. The Greek team is looking at olives and olive oil, the Danish team at pigs and pork products. Here in the UK, we are looking at wheat, flour and bread. All groups are looking at both organic and conventional systems. For the purposes of the project, and drawing on the work of the Applied Philosophy Department at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, the potentially long and contentious list of relevant ethical concerns has been reduced to 10: Animal welfare Human health Methods of production and processing and their impact (eg, environmental) Terms of trade Working conditions Quality (taste, composition, etc) Origin and place Trust Voice Transparency Our research so far The first stage of our work, now almost complete, has been to conduct semistructured, elite interviews with senior or decision-making stakeholders in the chain. We have done 33 interviews to date, out of a projected total of around 40. The data collected will enable us to map the role and relative importance of ethical concerns along the chain. We are also about to conduct 15 semi-structured interviews with consumers, exploring their attitudes to bread. There is a large amount of current, quantitative data available on bread consumption, so our interviews will have a slightly different purpose: we will ask about interviewees Agrifood Network / October 2005 / Wheat and Bread / City University 2
views and buying habits, then make a short presentation on bread production, then ask if their views have changed, and whether their buying habits may change. Why bread? Because it is a staple food, consumed by 96% of the population on a frequent basis, with a long history of consumption. It is now largely produced by highly industrialised methods and has a well developed physical traceability system. On the other hand, traditional production methods are still to be found here and there. Wheat is traded as a bulk commodity and it has long been standard practice to blend it, both as grain and as flour, for reasons to do with both convenience and quality. For all of these reasons, we felt it posed a fundamental challenge to ethical traceability. If it s going to work, it has to be able to work for this chain. Logistically, the fact that the fact that less than 1% of our bread is imported and only 2% exported, while 80% of the flour that goes into UK bread is grown in the UK, provides us with an unusually domestic chain, and enables us to consult all stakeholders. (Statistics from Mintel, 2005) Outline of wheat-flour-bread chain Wheat The UK produces an average of between 14m and 16m tonnes of wheat annually, on 2m ha of harvested land spread over 33,000 farms, mostly in the south and east of England, with an average yield of 7.9T/ha. In general, it is a highly intensive form of agriculture. Organic production covers an estimated 40,000 ha. About a third of the domestic production is milled into flour. Flour 33 companies operate 68 flour mills, but the two largest (Rank Hovis and ADM) account for 50% flour production. The mills produce on average 4.5mT of flour a year. Domestic wheat is mixed with higher-protein imported wheat to achieve several hundred different blends, with specific characteristics defined by the mills customers, mainly the plant bakers. White flour in the UK is required by law to be fortified with calcium, B vitamins and iron -- these statutory additives need not be disclosed on the package. Bread The market for bread and bakery snacks is worth 3.5bn a year. 12 companies operating 59 plant bakeries produce around 80% of UK bread. White bread accounts for 64% of market by volume. The biggest three bakers (Allied, British Bakeries and Warburtons) account for 50% of plant bread market by value. In-store bakeries (which may by supplied with dough by plant bakeries) produce another 17%. The remaining 3% is produced by craft bakeries. Over the past five years, the bread market has shrunk in volume by 5% (bread consumption has been falling steadily since the 1880s) but grown in value by 9%: we are choosing more expensive brands and eating more plant baked speciality bread, eg ciabatas. 15m was spent on advertising bread in 2004. The Association of Baking Ingredient Manufacturers has 17 member companies, and a turnover of 500m a year. Agrifood Network / October 2005 / Wheat and Bread / City University 3
Distribution Multiple retailers sell 87% of bread by value, craft bakeries sell 6% and independent grocers and others 7%. Bread is unusual in that it largely bypasses the multiple retailers Regional Distribution Centres. It is usually delivered direct to store, by road, in fleets of lorries run by the bakeries. Provisional findings Most interviewees were familiar with and accepted the idea that ethical factors affect how business is done and cause change. Despite the frequent comment that ethics are subjective, and that reaching agreement about which ones to value would be difficult, there was in fact broad agreement about the relevance of the list of concerns. However, the priority given to different ethical concerns varied along the chain. We have talked about an ethical field of vision in which stakeholders see what affects their own business, and a little to either side, but not beyond. Strikingly though perhaps unsurprisingly, interviewees who were involved in explicitly ethical businesses were more likely to take a holistic view of the chain. There were many examples of discontinuities along the chain for example, the toxicologist with an agrichemicals firm who said that concern for animal welfare was not relevant to his work because his company produced chemicals for arable crops (ignoring the impact on insects, wildlife and also the animal testing he had earlier described in the development of the active ingredients). Not all sections of the chain want to illuminate what they do. Some want to conceal it. An interviewee from the milling sector said that he saw it as his role to manage ethical issues, by preventing or controlling public knowledge of any that would damage the industry. There was evidence in the interviews of the tendency to see ethical branding as a means of differentiating products or adding value in other words, of increasing profit. This confines ethical production to a relatively more expensive niche, rather than becoming a corporate standard (Tallontire & Vorley 2005 ) The conventional and organic chains are not clearly distinct: many mills, bakeries and retailers work with both organic and conventional products. There is a stronger distinction between industrial and artisanal production chains. The industrial chain ascribes high value to uniformity; the artisanal chain values variety. In the industrial chain, the mill is the point where a natural variable product becomes a uniform industrial ingredient. Agrifood Network / October 2005 / Wheat and Bread / City University 4
The wheat-flour-bread chain is covered by assurance and traceability schemes from farm to shop. These systems are generally not transparent to consumers unless the producer or retailer sees commercial benefit in making the information available. The information is, in any case, complex and there is lots of it. As a mechanism for driving up standards, it may be that traceability systems will be of more use to regulators than to consumers. One question is: who is deciding what will be assured or regulated or standardised? Human nutrition is not currently captured by production assurance or ethical standards. For example, the committee that approves wheat seeds for inclusion on the National List, from which farmers choose which ones to grow, does not have any nutritional input. Again, in current debates about the healthiness of bread (white v wholewheat, high v low-carb), the effect of plant baking on the nutritional quality of bread is not discussed. Traceability legislation and assurance schemes are currently proliferating. If these schemes and regulations are to capture ethical attributes, it would be desirable to make these integral at the outset, rather than bolt them on later. Two definitions of traceability: Traceability systems are recordkeeping systems designed to track the flow of product or product attributes through the production process or supply chain Golan et al, 2004 -- a report from the US Department of Agriculture The ability to follow a food, feed, food-producing animal or substance or substance intended to be or expected to be incorporated into a food or feed through all stages of production, processing and distribution EU General Food Law 178/2002 The US definition recognises attributes, whereas the EU definition seems to focus more on physical entity. The US report goes on to say that a function of traceability is to differentiate and market foods with subtle or undetectable quality attributes. At present, there is broad international agreement on traceability laws and regulations relating to food safety, but less agreement on traceability systems relating to credence or process attributes and suspicion of protectionism. Agrifood Network / October 2005 / Wheat and Bread / City University 5