Promoting Agricultural Value Chains
In the OIC Member Countries
31
The boom of the flower sector has had tremendous benefits for both export generation,
employment creation – more than 100,000 jobs have been created – and gender perspectives,
as more than 75 percent of the workers are female (EFE, 2015). Although some observers
criticise the dominant role of Dutch foreign investors and the continued dependency on the
Netherlands as the main export market, the flower sector is generally regarded as a successful
case of diversification into non-traditional exports.
2.2.3 Private sector standards: Boosting confidence in UK farmers through
the Red Tractor logo
In the mid-1990s, the UK food industry found itself in deep crisis. Alarmed by the outbreak of
BSE, which led to the slaughtering of more than three million cattle in an effort to control the
disease, and other public health disasters such as salmonella in eggs, consumer confidence had
reached a historical low. The economic toll of these crises was enormous: in 1996/1997 alone
the overall economic impact of BSE was estimated at £740-980 million (Atkinson, 1999).
As a response to these high profile ‘food scares’, the UK government intensified food safety and
animal welfare regulations, particularly for meat production and processing, and established
an independent Food Standards Agency to enforce regulations. UK retailers also sought to
restore consumer confidence by drawing up their own private food safety standards to
practice due diligence and ensure that the safety and quality of products was maintained
throughout the supply chain. As numerous private labels emerged simultaneously and
threatened to result in considerable confusion among consumers, the British Farm Standard
was developed by Assured Food Standards – a coalition of several producer associations and
other sections of the agrifood industry – and officially launched by then Prime Minister Tony
Blair in 2000. Products that comply with these standards are labelled with the Red Tractor
logo:
“The Red Tractor is a food assurance scheme which covers production standards
developed by experts on safety, hygiene, animal welfare and the environment amongst
other things.” (Assured Food Standards, 2015)
By checking compliance through independent certification bodies and offering full traceability
from farm to pack, the Red Tractor logo aims to ensure that food conforming to its standards is
safe to consume and was produced with respect for the environment and animal welfare (Red
Tractor website). Separate standards under the umbrella logo exist for six sectors: beef and
lamb, pigs, poultry, dairy, combinable crops and sugar beet, and fresh produce. This
standardisation and harmonization effort served two main purposes; firstly, to differentiate
‘safe’ from ‘unsafe’ producers and secondly, to provide a platform for rebuilding the value of
agricultural commodities produced in the UK (Henson & Humphrey, 2010). Later in 2005 the
Red Tractor logo was redesigned to incorporate the Union Jack in the background to
emphasise that the standards not only guarantee safe food, but also stand for the British origin
of the food.
Within just a few years of its inception, the Red Tractor label achieved acceptance by all major
buyers and retailers, and managed to establish itself as a general quality indicator for
agricultural products (Henson & Humphrey, 2010). By now, more than 88,000 farming
enterprises comply with one of the standards under the Red Tractor logo which has a market
recognition of 64 percent among UK consumers (Assured Food Standards, 2015). The success
of the Red Tractor logo has also led to its expansion from initially labelling primary products