World Food Policy Volume 2, Number 1, Spring 2015 | Page 54

The Role of Proximity and Standards in Guaranteeing Vegetable Safety in Vietnam of weaknesses. Illustrations taken from the authors’ work in Vietnam, and also on some secondary sources, will then be presented. The authors’ experience is based on the study of domestic rather than export markets, and on vegetables rather than other commodities. The paper concludes with a summary of the main issues and some recommendations in terms of research. encephalopathy (BSE) struck in 1996, followed by the dioxin crisis in Belgium in 1999. Avian influenza started in Hong Kong and then moved to inland China and Vietnam in 2005. The response to food scares is a drop in food consumption, and recovery is always incomplete (Böcker and Hanf 2000). After the second crisis of BSE in 1999, three years were necessary for consumption to reach its previous level, despite very low real risk. Industrial production, as well as information brought to light by scientific experts, was made invalid by BSE (Allaire 2005). Organic agriculture is not spared from stigmatization. In 2011, Escherichiacoli that developed from germinated seeds produced in an organic farm caused the death of 38 people in Germany. The origin of the bacteria had been wrongly attributed to Spanish cucumbers by German food safety authorities, which led to more than 500 million euros in losses due to the drop in consumption (Wollman and Briat 2011). In 2003, Korea banned beef imports from the United States because of BSE. In early 2006, Korea and the United States resumed an import protocol. This resulted in what was considered as one of the biggest anti-government demonstrations in two decades. Although it is less characterized by “de-territorialization” than other sectors, agriculture is being increasingly driven by international food chains. Internationalization and concentration are observed in the sector of agricultural inputs as well as retailing. These processes started to be documented in t he 1990s (Goodman and Watts 1997; Morgan, Marsden, and Murdoch 2006). According to Friedmann (1994, 272), the dominant Growing concern for food safety Globally T he growing distrust of consumers in the safety of food is widely documented in both developed and transitional economies. This is related to the growing intensification (in terms of use of chemical inputs) or even industrialization of food production and processing, as well as to the growing distances between food production and food consumption sites. As stated by Ménard and Valceschini (2005), “recent developments have encouraged consumers to adopt a ‘suspicious approach’.” Technological innovations, combined with the diversity of product origins and the internationalization of trade, stimulate consumers’ risk aversion, which has been exacerbated by recent events such as “mad cow” disease, the poultry flu pandemic, etc. (p. 427). “The costs and efficiency of alternative organizational and institutional answers in establishing credible commitments are at stake” (p. 428). In Europe, food crises have been especially acute in the meat sector since the 1990s. Bovine spongiform 53