 It's really nice to be here, thank you for inviting me and I'm really just testing out my idea for this larger project and presenting some fairly still preliminary findings. So I'll be really interested in the feedback and there'll be some bits where I haven't joined up all the dots yet. So in a way I'll be talking through my project idea and my methodology for a larger project using free range eggs as my example. So the basic idea of the project is that consumers, growers and governments are becoming increasingly concerned that the dominant industrial agri-food system delivers cheap pletiful reliable food to western consumers at too higher price in terms of social, ecological and health impacts. And so there's been a number of ways in which they try to point out these impacts of the way we've organised our food chains to produce, process, store, transport and retail food and various social movements or alternative food politics are trying to change the values and power structures and technologies that are embedded or conventionalised in these long food chains that we have. And the idea of the project is that in these food wars, as one set of authors have called them, regulation and governance at both the global and the domestic level have inevitably become a huge issue of contention. So alternative food movements are arguing for stronger government and inter-governmental regulation of the practices of industrial agri-food all along the food chain, so from things like banning battery cages to advertising junk food to children. They've also created new civil society regulation to support new niche markets for alternative food production, so organic free range and so on. And then powerful players in the conventional agri-food system have also responded by creating their own industry self-regulatory accreditation and labelling schemes and by strategically contesting attempts to better regulate hot issues like genetic modification, pesticide use, food safety, wastage and so on. Okay, so that's the big picture of the sort of phenomenon that I'm interested in. And there's a tendency towards seeing consumer choice at the domestic level and perhaps free trade at the international levels as important ways to change this whole system. And it's often put in terms of shortening the distance between the consumer and the producer in terms of the number of links in the food chain, so bringing me closer to the hen or giving me as the consumer more knowledge about what goes on and sense of connection. So what, so and regulation trying to change the system is a big part of it. So what I'm trying to do with my project is a series of what are called radically inductive case studies of particular foods, primary products that raise issues of contention within the industrial agri-food system. And with each one of them I'm going to start with the consumer eyes view of that food and then trace back through the food chain how the regulatory pathways taken and not taken helped create the consumer choices that we see before us. And how, and what choices have been constructed for us to give us the chance to put these alternative values back into the food chain and change it. So how have the social movement politics of alternative food used regulation to try and construct new choices for us and new pathways back through the food chain? And how have powerful industrial agri-food players resisted or co-opted or adapted to those attempts to change their values? And specifically how have they used regulation to do so? Or to put it more abstractly, how has regulation helped to shape and transform capitalism in response to social movement politics? So how is consumer choice in the market constructed by regulation? What other regulatory responses and pathways are being created or could have been or still are possible and what difference does it make to values, interests and power structures? Okay, so that's the sort of theoretical question that I'm coming at and what I'm interested in to start with is my first case study is eggs and free range eggs. And the issue that's had most airplay in the national media with free range eggs is how many hens per hectare should be allowed to count as free range. I'll just say it's slightly different here in Canberra because there has been a stronger social movement here to ban cage eggs and I'll come back to that at the end because Canberra has therefore used a regulatory pathway that's a bit different to the rest of Australia. Okay, but the contest at the moment is mainly a contest over one provision in the industry association's voluntary quality assurance system. So the egg corporation is the industry association. They have a quality assurance system that does all sorts of things but one part of it is that it says that if you can use a free range system and a free range system is one that meets eggs definition. The animal welfare part of the egg corporation's accreditation system is based on the government's model code of practice which is not mandated but it's there as a standard. And it currently says that 1,500 hens per hectare on an outdoor range constitutes free range. Although the egg corp contests this and says that what it means is 1,500 hens per hectare if they don't move around and there's no limit if they do move around to other paddocks. And they're arguing that there should be an absolute maximum of 20,000 per hectare. And I've given you on, oh no I haven't because it didn't work. Sorry, I thought I'd moved on, I think I did it on there. So they say that it needs to be 20,000 because the market share for free range eggs has moved from 8% to 25% since the 1,500 was set. So that's their first argument and their second argument is that in fact at the moment 29% of free range egg production in Australia is stocked at densities higher than 20,000 per hectare. And so they say that if they make it 20,000 then it will actually improve what's going on at the moment. So what you can see there by their arguments is that what they're trying to do is to frame hen welfare in terms purely of the number of hens per hectare, that's their biggest worry. And as a matter of individual consumer choice for those who want to be able to pay a little more but not too much more for the luxury of happy hens in their supermarket. So this is my argument about what's going on there. So basically they're saying well we have to make the accreditation system match the market and the ability for the supermarkets to sell these eggs. But this is just one small issue raised by consumer choice raised by animal welfare activists about hen welfare and free range eggs. So I've actually got a handout here that summarises this in more detail of it. I'm sure I don't have enough but you can have a look and I've done this so that if people are interested in a personal basis on knowing what they're buying there's also some information there that will help you. So if we look more broadly at the moment the issues about how many hens per hectare outside but actually if you look at what the free range farmers movement is worried about or animal welfare activists, there's of course also the issue of how many hens inside, not just outside. There's the issue of beak trimming which is that they chop the tip of their beaks or more off very early so that they won't peck each other. And if you've got a lot crowded in then that's a big problem but free range, smaller scale free range farmers say that if they're outside and happy they won't be pecking each other either. There's environmental issues about the ground that they're actually ranging over and whether it is actually able to support vegetation and whether or not so in the large scale egg production you end up with hens on basically dirt and they're eating grain feed and it's not what you imagine it to be basically whereas the small scale ones then rotate them through paddocks or maybe they have a mixed farm where they go in after the cows or whatever so they have an ecological system. Okay so there's a range of bigger issues with animal welfare and what free range means. And for the purposes of my, sorry this is a picture of a cage system, it's a very nice picture. For the purposes of my project I'm arguing that there's really three kinds of bigger issues that are the social movement of alternative food is raising with industrial agri-food system and I think these are all raised by their issue of cage hens and free range hens. So this is the picture of the traditional sort of cage, this is by one of the manufacturers of the barn system so this is what they want you to believe and with the ones that have like 20,000 hens per hectare and call them free range what they do is they basically take out the cage part of that and they have ramps and things and then they have some pop holes down the bottom so that notionally the chickens can get outside to the range but in fact most of them won't go outside because they can't find their way or they're too scared to go past the other hens or it's not attractive enough out on the range anyway because it's all been eaten out. This is a picture you can see from Animals Australia that's what one of those things actually looks like once 10,000 chickens have been pooing all over it for a couple of years and that's meant to tell us that one of the issues is agroecological so if you think about layer, intense factory farming of eggs then it's not just about whether the hen has enough room to move that's an important issue but it's also about the ecological burden of industrial agro food and things like what do you do with all these feces from the chickens is a huge issue. Part of the idea of free range is that you might come up with a more holistic agroecological system. Another issue with the industrial agro food system is public health issues so a lot of the contest over the industrial agro food system is about as you probably know the over production of over processed energy dense but nutritionally poor food at cheap prices as opposed to kind of real food eaten in a physically healthy and socially, culturally and relationally meaningful way. So what we get you can see that illustrated here with chickens as well we get eggs that wider than wider have come from hens that may have been fed antibiotics and so on that are basically unhealthy and we're eating the egg that comes out. At the end of that there's things like we're running the risk of at a public health level of creating new viruses and so on like avian flu and perhaps we're also producing eggs that include that aren't as nutritionally healthy as they might be. Is the justice issue so at a general level with industrial agro food the issue then is that the industrial agro food system the alternative food politics people say is systemically unjust in the way it shares out the benefits of and risks of where what and how food is grown produce transported distributed access and so the burdens of the ecological degradation and the benefits of access to healthy meaningful affordable food aren't shared out evenly so you know we create the billion hungry and the billion obese the land grabbers and the small holders those who live near the farms at the edge of cities who suffer pesticide drift and smells and whatever and those of us who live in the inner city and go to the Queen Victoria markets or what every day. In the egg situation so these are some hands that I visited that are very happy they're getting a lot of justice and that's a pile of several thousand day old male chicks who are going to get minced up and used as pet food or stock or something so that's one of the little injustices in the system we might also think about the way one of the big issues at the moment for us in Australia is the supermarket duopoly and the way that that's created a system where we have large scale producers who have access to the national market and small scale farmers who have to well who may who don't have access to that market and who's argue that they're suffering injustice that they don't have easy access to a retail market and again free range farming is one way to try and create an alternate way of for a small scale producer to get to a consumer. So I just put that there because it says it's at one of the supermarkets in Canberra and says our fresh eggs come straight from a farm so as you can see what they're trying to do is they're trying to tell you that you're very connected to the source of your food as a consumer despite the fact that there's actually quite a few links in the chain between buying a carton of eggs at a supermarket and the hen and the that produce the egg and whatever their the sun and the earth that produce their feed there's probably even a few steps between those the hen and the the actual environment. So alternative social movements around food use these agroecological public health and justice values as a basis for trying to contest, unsettle and then reconnect the chain in industrial agro food using different values and privileging different players. So my research project sees the debate about the egg corporation standard and the various competing voluntary accreditation systems which you saw briefly on that PowerPoint slide as an indication of a bigger contest over the whole approach to creating the food chain between the hen and the consumer and it assumes that in order to have a food chain in the first place or to create a new one you need to use some kind of regulation formal or informal such as voluntary accreditation systems and I'm going I won't talk much about theory but as I write it up I'll be able to draw on different theoretical literatures to talk about that so we might put it in terms of rationalities of governance or orders of worth or actor network theory so I'll just mention that for the moment but the kind of questions that we might ask then is we might look at well how are they using regulation to create a new food chain or to unsettle the existing one and how do they construct what value it is how that they're trying to achieve do they see it as a public good like the alternative food politics see it those public goods or do they see it as an individual consumer choice to have the luxury of being ethical who decides what the standards are where in the chain does the regulation kick in who bears the burdens and benefits and does the regulatory form open up or close down the possibility for further expansion of the kind of issue of the kind of values that are coming into the food chain okay so what we did with our research is try to uncover the chain between the consumer and producer so we looked at the retail how eggs are retailed and then tried to trace back from that we looked for you know whether they had claims about being free range or whatever and then try to trace back from that what regulation has helped to support those claims and then we went and then we went and actually talked to some of the farmers and some of the accreditation agencies and so on to understand how they actually worked so I'm going to give you a quick run through of what we've been finding by looking at what's actually available and how that relates to the food chain and how regulation supports that I don't actually know how long I'm meant to be talking for by the way okay that's good yeah okay okay so what we've found is a few different categories so what we did is we went and looked for and bought all the different kinds of free range eggs that we could in different retail spaces in Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne we did it in Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne because there's kind of different regulatory debates and pathways in those areas and also different other conditions so we wanted to see whether there was anything different and we found a few different categories of free range egg and what we're looking at is where they're sold, how they're displayed and what that's telling you about the story that they're trying to sell also what's on their label and what that's trying to tell you about about these eggs and the connection between the consumer and the hen so the main category and the one I'll talk mainly about is what I'm calling industrial or supermarket free range and this is available in Coles and Woolies and also IGA in every jurisdiction that we looked at and pretty much the same brands are available everywhere and they're aimed at the supermarket sale of this industrial egg so they basically maintain the dominant system, factory, intense factory farming but they seek to create the idea of the choice to buy an ethical egg from a happy hen by telling us that it's free range, that it's being sold by a nice clean trustworthy supermarket sometimes there's information on the packs and then about the system and there's a lot of branding, you know, pictures of hens and grass or beautiful eggs or sunshine or just lots of yellow or lots of green that tell us that try to get us to have the feeling that the hen has been very much in connection with the sun and the grass most of these one so these are the ones that are basically in order to ensure this consistent supply to all these supermarkets these are ones that are produced in huge barns with maybe 8,000 hens or something okay so what's happening is that we see that they're trying to give us a different choice or make us feel like we've got a different choice and certainly the number of people who are buying these free range eggs is increasing so as you see it's increased from 14.5% to 28% between 2005 and 2011 and interestingly the shelf space is even larger so we have 28% of eggs that are sold of free range but 50% of the shelf space is free range we did look at Canberra oh unfortunately I can't get state by state breakdowns of what proportion of free range versus cage is sold in the different states because it would be really fascinating to know that whether it's different when you're in Canberra where you have the big labels on the shelves but it is I thought that maybe that would mean there'd be more free range and less cage as a proportion on the Canberra shelves but there wasn't it's still the same 50% free range on the carton and in the branding also means of course a price premium at the supermarket for the producer and the retailer so people are eating more eggs lately the last 10 years or so and they have been quite profitable in general but there's been quite large costs in the last 5 or 6 years as well because the cost of feed went up presumably because of the drought supermarkets as you know are trying to keep prices very low and there were also new cage requirements introduced a few years ago so the cages have to be bigger which means that producers had to invest in new barn systems so you can see that the option of putting in place a barn system that they can call free range and get a limited price premium but a limited price premium through the supermarket would be very attractive in that context and so you can see there what the price premium is so the average price per dozen for any eggs is $4.43 but you can generally charge at least $5.50 in a supermarket and up to $10 or $11 for organic free range eggs in specialty shops free range also means that cage eggs aren't banned though of course the need to brand something as free range means that the alternative the movement to completely ban cage eggs hasn't yet succeeded so that's part of the system that you have a choice it's not that we've decided to regulate back on the farm we're giving the consumer the ability to regulate right at the other end of the chain okay and then most of these supermarket free range eggs are egg corp accredited so and it's interesting that if you look on them you won't actually necessarily even see a little logo saying they're egg corp accredited because what is happening is the supermarket is saying they should be egg corp accredited and they're saying to the consumer trust us that these are free range if we're selling them as free range but this whole debate about stocking densities is because partly because the supermarkets have then said okay we need to be able to sell more free range eggs at a cheap price so the egg corp is responding to that and the egg corp is also beginning to realise that consumers themselves are worrying about it so they want to be able to put something on the cartons and explain it to consumers and so they're starting to look at having a marketing strategy that isn't just aimed at the supermarket as the regulator but at the consumer as the regulator so that's the industrial free range and then we also found some other options that are not available in the supermarkets so there's what I'm calling true and inverted commerce free range or accredited free range and this is basically only available in Melbourne at farmers markets and boutique stores these are brands that rely very heavily on plain packaging perhaps with accurate looking photos rather than sort of professionally produced photos of happy hens storybook type images they don't look too professional our interviews with farmers said often they purposely don't look professional so they might actually encourage themselves to put the labels on skew if or something and these are accredited by the free range farmers association or humane choice which have quite much stricter standards as you can see by the handout they're sold a lot at supermarkets and other specialty stores often especially at the farmers markets they will have like a poster board out the front of the store that gives a lot of information about the system and might also include activism against cage eggs or supermarket free range or other people who are selling free range eggs they use that to explain their trustworthiness to customers and to justify the price premium but you also wonder whether this accreditation is really necessary because if they're being sold at farmers markets and so on then it's the producer there that the consumer can ask anyway so why do they need an accreditation system and in fact that's what's interesting about research in Sydney and Canberra because in Sydney and Canberra nobody's accredited with these free range farmers association or humane choice so I'm calling that personal connection free range so they're pretty much the same sort of systems and labels and so on on their eggs but you just ask the person at the stall or you go to somewhere like Chokoo by Joe where they tell you from a particular farm down the road but what's interesting is in Sydney and Canberra the emphasis seems to be on whether it's local and how it tastes and how fresh it is whereas in Melbourne the emphasis seems to be on how ethical it is and whether it's accredited so take away from that what you want but of course the problem is that where there isn't any accreditation then you do have to actually have the conversation and if you go somewhere I should have also said organic seems way more important in Sydney and Canberra compared with Melbourne which seems to go with the taste thing so that's a very popular brand in Sydney and maybe Canberra but once you go to some of these markets especially in Sydney and Canberra where they don't have any accreditation and once you start asking questions you actually do start to find that some of them are not the really small scale ones they are bigger ones and if you start knowing the right questions to ask you start finding out some things that might make you question it like for example Hens being locked up until midday because they need to lay and the farmer doesn't want them to lay outside because of all the shit lying around which makes you wonder whether that's really the idea of free range that you thought okay there's also other dodgy, what I call dodgy free range around so you've probably heard about cases where in order to get the supply for the supermarket or whatever people have substituted cage eggs for free range we've also found some labels where they have little things that look like accreditation logos that aren't really ones we also found one where they seem to have actually abused one of the real ones and then we could also talk about can't be bothered checking free range which I guess is what I was just mentioning so non accredited free range they may not meet any particular definition of free range and so retailers who can't be bothered checking can sell that and as far as I can work out or perhaps don't want to be bothered as far as I can work out IGA and Audi fit into that category so Coles and Woolies have standards, they're very low standards in terms of what free range means but it is a set of standards the egg corp standards whereas IGA and Audi don't have anything they may, the production system may actually fall somewhere in between huge scale industrial free range and what we might think of as true small scale free range so they may be better than Coles and Woolies eggs but we can't be sure alright conclusions then, the conclusions are a bit long so first set of conclusions so what I'm interested in is that capitalism markets are constantly evolving and changing in response to social movements, politics, new expressions of values, new technologies, new efficiencies and regulation deregulation, reregulation are helping to capitalism to adapt and change regulation helps create new markets to constrain and change existing markets, perhaps shutdown markets and so the interesting thing we want to know then is how it's changing and what the regulation is doing to help that change be going one direction or another, be more substantive or symbolic is it co-opting and conventionalizing social movement values that sucks the life out of them or is it doing something else, so my preliminary conclusions looking at the supermarkets then, what we see is a lot of industrialization and conventionalization of alternative free range values so we see the selling of basically traditional industrial eggs but with some improvements so it's a modification to the existing food chain and the existing product rather than something that's a big substantive difference there is however one free range farmers association accredited alternative brand available in Melbourne Coles so there is one brand which is a substantially different product rather than just a minorly different product and in line with what I said before in Sydney and Canberra there are some organic brands that seem to be maybe substantially different although they're Sunny Queen and Pace which are two of the big producers, I forgot to tell you that egg production is dominated by three big producers in Australia who have about half the market there is one premium organic brand which we found in Woolworths in Neutral Bay so again which is certainly a substantially different product so on the whole we don't see new product categories in the supermarket rather we see a sort of differentiated product available in the supermarket that's called free range but we don't see a substantially new product in the supermarket as a response to free range however we do see niche retailers, farmers markets, organic food stores and so on that seem to have a growing place in the market and the standard figures are that the supermarkets have about 50% of the market for fresh food sales and farmers markets and organic food stores and so on have about 7% and appear to be growing but they appear to be largely a separate alternative sort of hippie market rather than necessarily a huge challenge to the supermarkets but I guess that's the question a number of misleading and deceptive labelling cases which might appear to give consumers confidence they can buy true free range wherever they look but because we don't actually have any agreement about the meaning of free range that's actually essentially meaningless in other words you can't police free riding if the issue is the social construction of the meaning of the thing that they would be free riding off so if you don't know what free range is you can only effectively police against the really, really egregious cases. Second lot of so that was conclusions about what's changing in the market and then of course the interesting question to ask what regulatory so I've given you a bit of a flavour of some of the regulatory paths that have supported those things that have changed and then the interesting thing is what regulatory paths have not yet been taken but may have been possible or may still be possible how might there be regulatory pathways that might see free range as more of a collective good rather than as a individual good right at the end of the food chain at the point of consumer choice at what other stages of the process might regulation of free range have kicked in other than at the point of consumer purchase voluntary accreditation systems and some of the things that we might have thought about would be some kind of regulation or incentivization of environmental sustainability or health of the farms that might force producers out of intensive factory farming altogether but of course there's also the alternative that they'll just come up with more technological solutions to deal with things like disposing of all the chemical matter and so on. The regulation of on farm welfare practices so far in Australia we've only got a this model code of practice it's not mandatory we've got very minimal regulation of cages but egg producers are well aware that there's a ban on battery cages in the EU and increasingly in the US and that that may well come here and a lot of this debate about free range and voluntary accreditation systems is to take attention away I think from the possibility that we might regulate on farm welfare practices better another issue is competition policy and supermarkets which might if we if we took a different pathway that had prevented coals and willies becoming the BM of duopoly making their choice being the ones essentially regulating what free range really means for most people then we might have opened up retail pathways that gave consumers different choices and also gave smaller farmers more choices Here in Canberra you've got a mandatory definition and labelling of free range and cage eggs and at least that sort of moves the issue makes the definition a bit clearer and moves the issue back in the chain a bit more because it makes the retailer responsible rather than the consumer having to figure it all out but of course if the definition you choose is the absolute lowest common denominator and the one that the supermarkets already kind of use then it doesn't actually make much difference as I think our data shows and then finally the last two is sometimes what a social movement might want is actually decommodification so taking something out of the market altogether and of course we've had a big backyard chalk movement these days and the even more demodified option as one of the green senator in New South Wales said when I went to the forum on free range he said well of course we could all become vegan and then handed out the vegan cupcakes so his point of view was clear so now that's some nice backyard chalks I saw in Canberra once so some of you might have read Julie Guthman's book agrarian dreams about how the organic movement in California was co-opted and conventionalised by becoming an industry and seeking accreditation standards and regulation and she argued that this actually de-radicalised the hippie organic movement set back agroecological values in farming in California by breaking down the social movement that could have kept on providing a continued critique of the dominant system so I guess the questions that this leaves for me with free range eggs is whether these alternative markets that we've got these free range these farmers markets that give the small scale farmers a pathway to the consumer whether these are strong enough to provide a continued critique of supermarket free range so that there might be continued incremental improvement or whether the supermarket duopoly is so powerful that they'll fail eventually and what other regulation of what other points along the food chain might might also help support further change and then of course the egg corporation are very worried about the possibility of imported eggs and this might be a beat up but on the other hand you can understand with all the panic about World Trade Organization rules and so on that there might be a real fear that in the long run the restrictions that we have now that don't allow eggs to be imported may be broken down at some point under the pressure of the need for the industrial agro food system to provide cheap eggs and that may come in and create a different situation okay and I've talked for way too long thank you very much I'm going to use my position and ask a quick question before I turn it over to the audience just because I know you've focused on Australia but you mentioned the EU having a ban on battery cages I'm not sure I want to find out what they've done is they've banned battery cages but they allow enriched cages just to be clear my question relates to the potential progressively redistributive impact of regulation and you touched on this briefly at the very very end of your talk about how a system can be introduced that pays me a subsidy for installing solar collectors on my roof and the average funder has to pay twice as much for her electric power as they did before that's troubling to me and one of the issues here of course is making a good source of protein available to the banners and the question is what type of regulation will accommodate their needs as well as the wider values that we've been talking about that's really the whole debate about industrial agro food actually it provides cheap food safe, consistent food available to everybody and so that's what it says its value is and these alternative ones then potentially putting that at risk by saying well you have to pay more for quality eggs and I think that's a bit of a conundrum still that really we're paying the argument is of course that we're paying the price for those cheap prices in the long run that intense factory farming is ruining the and it's not just about the happiness of the hand it's about the fact that this is ruining the environment and one of the biggest fears is that if China has all huge numbers of factory farms doing layer hens that's where this avian influence grew and it's really putting people at risk so yeah the price isn't worth it there's also an interesting argument that I read it's a bit polemic but they're basically saying that chicken egg farming is one thing we need to do that way it really is sustainable and economic to be done on a very small scale and with backyard chooks and just really very small scale farms all over the place and that people could afford eggs it's just that we don't have the number of small scale farms that we should have and certainly everybody I interviewed so I haven't been to heaps yet but they're definitely not worried about they're not using these accreditation standards to sort of cut out competition because they've got way bigger markets than they can possibly deal with so there's clearly heaps more space for there to be heaps more small scale true free range farms than there is at the moment which suggests that there might also be space for the price to go down if there was more that raises the issue of context specific trade-offs I mean look for example in Norway where I imagine most people able to afford eggs that are sustainably more humanely produced look for example in Hong Kong where you got to do backyard farming is for courses for courses and follow up on that are there constraints on regulating the small scale producer? I don't know that's one of the things that I want to look at is what I want to do is I want to sort of then trace back well there could be different pathways why is it that we don't have more small scale retailers and retail spaces for them and to what extent is that about the retail spaces or to what extent is it about whatever limits there are including regulatory problems with setting up small scale farms so I don't know Thanks Cristina I wonder in terms of regulatory solutions well as I was listening to you I thought of the paper by Acohoff the economist who wrote this paper called The Market and Lens which is this idea that under conditions of age symmetry where the seller knows much more than the buyer the seller can basically put stuff onto the market that will ultimately see good products being driven out of the market because consumer confusion and all sorts of other things happen and one of the Acohoff's solutions to that problem was the brand the trademark Truth and Label but it seems to me that since Acohoff wrote that paper it's an old paper back in the 1960s now what we actually see happening in the market place is this huge proliferation around brands and so the age symmetry as it were continues so and this is a sort of problem not just in this area but right across the wall in certification movements now we see that so one solution which has been attempted and I'm not sure whether it's working or not is the slides of meta regulation in certification but ICL for example is an attempt to set standards for good certification and that's a sort of way as we're dealing with re-implementing Acohoff's solution and one can imagine more extreme cases that governments really wanted to introduce Truth and Label and the most obvious example is that you would effect the rights of trademark owners or those ownership rights over labels if they weren't committed to Truth in advertising so you could have a meta regulator as it were setting minimum standards if you could only compete above that standard you could never go below it and in extreme cases as has happened with Big Tobacco you lose your trademark rights and that really then forces the Acohoff solution onto the marketplace so that consumers aren't as it were handled anymore by Acohoff symmetry yeah well that's a comment I guess I don't see I haven't seen it happening although the humane choice label accreditation that's actually there's an international society so that seems to be trying to do a bit of that for animal welfare labelling they seem to be trying to get some kind of consistent minimum standard for accreditation but of course we had the food labelling review in Australia a couple of years ago and they basically said values issues are just to be left to voluntary accreditation we're not going to set any flaw on Truth in labelling for values issues only for safety issues so safety is what the dominant industrial agri-food system is worried about and values is what all these alternative food movements are worried about so they basically said okay the regulations all going to be down it's going to be up to the consumer to worry about it and there's certainly a fair bit of literature on these sort of things pointing out that that puts over loads the cognitive capacity of the consumer but I would also I don't know it probably didn't come through clearly enough but I guess one of my key arguments is that it's basically giving us the message that this is an individual good that we're buying that the regulation is creating an individual good that an individual can choose to pay the premium for whereas some of the other alternatives might have said oh this is actually a public good that implicates bigger value issues and so that would suggest different regulatory solutions I think yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah it's interesting yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah the free range farmers people that I spoke to they basically put it as they were just they were constructing an alternative market but they weren't challenging the dominant market so they were basically saying it's an individual choice although as you say some of them would see it more in terms of ecological values which suggests more of a public good than a purely individual choice to buy this from happy hens whereas the animal activist organization so RSPCA to some extent and Animals Australia they've got quite strong campaigns to ban cages or at least battery cages and they see the movement to buy free range as a boycott or buycott to support the ban on cage whereas the free range farmers association doesn't really see it that way and I think it's correct too that the organic associations as Julie Guthman says necessarily really arguing strongly for changing the whole system they're also just creating an alternative so yeah it's that's the worry that they just say okay well we're happy to create this niche market rather than look for improvements in the whole system I haven't yet I've got an appointment with them yeah we have yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah