Food Regulation and Retailing in a New Institutional Context ANDREW FLYNN, TERRY MARSDEN AND EVERARD SMITH Retailing, regulation and the state A key feature of food policy in recent decades has been the rise of the corporate retailers as central players. Our research in the 1990s on retailers and the regula- tion of food quality identi®ed a dual system of regulation. 1 This dual system involved a publicly regulated and spatial system controlled and monitored by the state (both national and local) and en- forced through the environmental health ocers in local authorities; and an emer- gent privately organised quality system led by the corporate retailers and imple- mented through their national and inter- national food supply chains. More than two decades of government deregulation and corporate retailing ascendancy, we argued, had produced a dualistic regula- tory terrain. The evidence suggested, through the dual functions of public and privately regulated systems, that any new nationally or internationally organised public functions would need to be sensitive to the complex supply chain systems of private regulation of corporate retailers. In this article we present a preliminary analysis of the most recent period (1999± 2002), a period which has seen a further intertwining between Brussels and EU member states on food policy, and which, on the face of it, would suggest the re- armation of a stronger public interest in food quality and safety, with the setting up of the Food Standards Agency (FSA) in the UK and the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) in Europe. There have also been further organisational changes with potentially important implications for consumer interests in food: notably the replacement of the Ministry of Agri- culture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF) by the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Aairs (DEFRA), and the con- solidation of the DG for consumer aairs (DG-SANCO) in Brussels. What impacts do these organisational and institutional changes have for food regulation in the UK and Europe? And what implications do they have for our conceptualisations of private and public forms of regulation, as well as the changing nature of the consumer interest? We ®rst brie¯y de- scribe and analyse the impacts of these organisational and regulatory changes, and then explore how they interact with developments in British food retailing and the domestic context in which it must operate. What emerges is a picture of the regulatory and retailing terrain that helps to shape our understanding of the contemporary consumer interest. Historically, at both the UK and the EU level, producer-led interests have dominated food policy. Until relatively recently consumer interests in the man- agement and regulation of food were marginalised. Now, as the old certainties surrounding the production and manage- ment of food and their regulation begin to dissolve, new patterns of regulation and organisation are emerging. While govern- ment and retailers (and other economic interests) have embraced a rhetoric of consumerism, they have not fully em- braced a coherent notion of consumer- led food regulation. Instead, what we # The Political Quarterly Publishing Co. Ltd. 2003 Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA 38