Concluding Observations: Perspectives and Prospects for the Regulatory Environment of Organic Food Safety in Asia Pacific

Abstract

The issues encountered by twenty-first century Asian nations in the field of organics regulation and food safety are not new. In striking a balance between agricultural productivism and crop production based on organic principles, nearly all the nations of Asia Pacific play out an instalment of a history close to hand. In several respects, the dilemma encountered in Europe after the World War Two has merely been reanimated in modern Asia as its nations rise to ever-greater prosperity. Policy steers a course, or floats adrift, between a desire to feed millions and revering romantic ideas about producing food. Yet in other aspects, perhaps more important ones, including the rise of marketing and its focus on consumer perception and verification of food origin, the debate over what role the state can and should play in the production of clean, unpolluted farm produce free of synthetic inputs has entered a new territory. It seeks only to defend what consumers believe about food notionally, at least, until the science is in and sensible accommodation of light touch conventional and eco-purist approaches is found. This concluding chapter conducts a broad survey of this book’s chapter contributions in a theme of the more things change the more they stay the same. But it also flags the discussions in this book which, although not entirely outside the scope of conventional historical or political frameworks, do give pause for thought or suspicion about what the future holds.