Contemporary food policy issues and the food supply chain
讨论了将政策制定视为食品系统内生组成部分的政治经济学观点，并以食品安全、食品研发与产业竞争力、食品标签三个案例进行了初步分析。
The traditional approach to the analysis of food policy treats government as an impartial 'clearing house', balancing the needs of different groups and correcting for market failures. Recent writings on political economy, parti-cularly relating to agriculture, argue that policy making should be treated as an endogenous component of the food system which depends on the nature of the political institutions and the policy-making process, and on interest groups and their relative strengths. In this paper, these ideas are discussed in relation to food policy generally and in particular, to three specific examples: food safety; food research and development (R&D) in relation to industrial competi-tiveness; and food labelling. The preliminary analysis presented in this paper supports the view that this is a fruitful area for further investigation.