World Food Policy Volume 2, Number 1, Spring 2015 | Page 60

The Role of Proximity and Standards in Guaranteeing Vegetable Safety in Vietnam

that it may entail (Allen 1999), which
may come at the expense of developing
economies (Grolleau, Sirieix, and Schaer
2010; Kempet al. 2010).

The first initiatives in the areas of
organic agriculture and fair trade in the
1960s “were characterized by a high level
of vertical integration that went all the
way from marginalized producers and
their organizations to dedicated retail
shops,” involved regular interactions
between producers and consumers,
and were based on informal norms
(Daviron and Vagneron 2011, 97). But
in the 1980s for fair trade and the 1990s
for organic agriculture, intermediaries
between producers and consumers
turned increasingly professional, formal
standards emerged, as well as third-party
certification, enabling these initiatives to
spread into modern distribution. This shift
also corresponded to growing consumer
concerns for food scares and decreasing
public support for agriculture. In Europe,
responsibility for food quality control
has shifted from government authorities
to industry actors (Wiskerke 2003). Trust
in persons is shifting increasingly into
trust in abstract systems, which is “the
condition of time–space distanciation
and of the large areas of security in dayto-day life which modern institutions
offer” (Giddens 1990, 113).

compared, and which provide a common
language to evaluators, the evaluated
and their audiences”(Ponte, Gibbon,
and Vestergaard 2011, 1). Standards
can be classified between performance
(e.g.,maximum residue limits) versus
process standards (e.g.,fair trade and
GlobalGAP); private versus public; and
mandatory versus voluntary (Reardon
et al.1999). There are hundreds of
organic private standards. Standards set
by the government include 60 organic
standards, pollution-free, or green
vegetables for China, etc.

Labels and standards have
something to do with trust, but of a
different kind than inter-personal trust.
While inter-personal trust is dialogical,
i.e., it enables a bilateral communication
and exchange, trust created through
conformity assessment is monological
and cannot replace the richness of
dialogue and experience; standards
are characterized by opacity (Busch
2011). “Trust in persons, as Enrikson
emphasizes, is built upon mutuality of
response and involvement: faith in the
integrity of another is a prime source of a
feeling of integrity and authenticity of the
self. Trust in abstract systems provides
for the security of day-to-day reliability,
but by its very nature cannot supply
either the mutuality or intimacy which
personal trust relations offer” (Giddens
e. The limits of standards
1990, 114). Formal standardization
comes together with the substitutability
Standards
are
“rules
of of suppliers (Daviron and Vagneron
measurement established by regulation 2011), which inevitably handicaps smallor authority” ((quotation from Jones scale farmers with low assets in terms of
and Hill 1994) by Reardon et al. (1999)). capital and human skills.
They have been also defined as “norms
Besides, standardization and
selected as a model by which people, certification generate costs that are
objects, and actions ...can be judged and difficult for small-scale farmers to bear.
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