Non-government organizations (NGOs) are increasingly demanding that multi-national corporations implement Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) practices to improve their social and environmental performance. An example of this is a set of science-based standards developed in 2001 by EUREP, an association of major European food retailers. EUREP requires suppliers to meet standards that promote not only food safety and quality but also the health and well being of labor and the environment. This shift to private, nongovernmental, and purportedly more 'objective' systems for assuring quality and safety is one of the most important -and least studied- changes resulting from the neoliberal global political economy of the past two decades. How values of efficiency and profitability, which are considered critical to the business world, are harmonized with the public's interest in food safety, worker welfare, and environmental protection remains largely unexplored. How do private agrifood standards reconcile the economic goals of global supermarkets with the diverse social, economic, and environmental concerns of citizens? How are conflicting interests and values concerning these quality demands negotiated and settled in the creation of such standards? How is science used to legitimate them? What are the social and ethical implications of private standards for stakeholders in the agrifood sector of developing countries? This Societal Dimensions of Engineering, Science and Technology dissertation improvement grant supports research intending to help address these questions in a project which will examine how new private retailer-led standards for food safety and quality, as well as the environment and labor, are reorganizing and transforming Chile's export table grape commodity subsector. The rise of private-sector regulatory mechanisms and problems of corporate social responsibility are emerging as key issues within a range of fields concerned with standards, the transformation of the global agrifood sector, international development, globalization, and corporate social responsibility. This research will further our conceptual understanding of how the rise of an 'economy of qualities' facilitates and legitimates a shift from public to private regulatory institutions and systems in the global agrifood system. This project will contribute to theoretical debates concerning the implications of private regulation(i.e. standards) for ostensibly social goods, such as food safety, environmental protection, and worker welfare. In particular, this project seeks to improve our ability to understand how potentially conflicting worlds of interests and values are negotiated into a set of standards and how appeals to scientific values and practices are used to settle the negotiations. In a context where many efforts at CSR are increasingly dismissed as little more than corporate public relations exercises, this research will make an important empirical contribution for stakeholders (i.e. consumers, NGOs, retailers) interested in assessing the value that purportedly scientific standards have for ensuring corporate accountability towards stakeholders. Since standards for labor and the environment inherently reflect ethical and social concerns this research will be of value to workers, unions, NGOs, and community activists, concerned with understanding how science is used to define and enforce social standards and reconcile them with standards for food safety and quality. In analyzing the implications of EUREPGAP standards on various stakeholders, this research can inform debates about how the health and well-being of workers and the environment can best be protected and expanded in the agrifood sector. Furthermore, as EUREPGAP increasingly becomes the standard for access into the UK and European produce markets, this research will assist producers to understand how these standards might constrain or expand their ability to remain in the global marketplace. Finally, through identifying the social and ethical implications of private CSR standards for actors in the Chilean grape network, this research can inform public policy debates about appropriate government responsibilities towards agrifood standards and regulations. To achieve our project objectives, three complementary methods will be used including: 1) content analysis of historical studies and technical literature related to grape industry standards, 2) semi-structured interviews and, 3) participant observation. All empirical data will be analyzed in light of the ethical ideals to which they appeal, such as rights-based claims, virtue-based claims, or utilitarian notions of costs and benefits. This information would be valuable for a range of groups concerned with creating a global agrifood system that is broadly seen as fair and just for all stakeholders. These groups would include, for example, agrifood producers, exporters, national governments, unions, NGOs, consumer groups, and development agencies.
