Core Ethical Commitments

All of the CECs are ethical imperatives that society should make collective progress on — they highlight aspects of food that are worthy of concerted attention. A few of the ethical commitments are absolute rules applicable to all actors in the food chain at all times. Because violation of these absolute commitments is indisputably unethical, these commitments require immediate and rigorous fulfillment. For example, it is always unethical to use slave, trafficked or forced human labor. When these absolute ethical rules are not followed, an ethical violation has occurred. From an ethics perspective, producers have no discretion as to whether or when they meet these absolute rules. Companies should take care not to violate these absolute rules and to make sure that downstream players in their supply chain also do not do so. Likewise, when consumers are aware that a product violates an absolute ethical rule, they should consider not purchasing the product in order to avoid complicity with an unethical practice.

Most of the ethical commitments, however, are not absolute ethical rules prohibiting specific production practices, but instead identify ethically important goals that may be realized in various ways. While these ethically important commitments generally accommodate progress over time, aspects of some are especially urgent.

The CECs cover five areas of moral concern (environment; labor; farmers, ranchers, and fishers; public health and community well-being; and animal welfare) and we encourage consumers and other food system actors to use them in ways that align with their values. For example, companies with a particular commitment to one area of concern might prioritize their effort there, and consumers who place high moral value on one area of concern might prioritize products and companies that are leaders in that area.

In practice, it will not be uncommon for tensions between CECs to surface. For example, some measures to address greenhouse gas emissions may have negative consequences for land use or biodiversity. Moreover, it is possible that some pro-environmental actions may negatively affect non-environmental areas of concern, such as workers’ well-being or animal welfare, amplifying the need to acknowledge trade-offs and balance interests. Different actors will reach different conclusions about which ethical commitments to emphasize based on their underlying values and goals. Moreover, the Choose Food Project appreciates that collective progress in a system as vast, complex, and multifarious as the global food system depends on different food chain actors focusing more and earlier effort on some commitments rather than others.

It should be noted that most commitments apply to all products and producers. Some, however, apply only to a subset — for example, a commitment about the use of antibiotics in livestock animals would not apply to the producer of a wholly plant-based product, and a commitment to avoid inappropriate marketing practices targeting children would not be relevant to foods that experts in child health are encouraging children to consume in greater quantities.

We envision the CECs being used to create various ethics tools for market-based change of the food system. The CECs will form the backbone of these future ethics tools. We also see the CECs as an ethics tool in and of themselves.

Ethics tools are practical tools designed to improve decision-making and outcomes by systematically incorporating ethical considerations and structuring ethical reflection. Ethics tools have been developed for multiple sectors to facilitate decision-making by policymakers and professionals (physicians, public health practitioners), to register the opinions of the public to inform decision-making, and to help communicate about the ethical dimensions of decisions. These tools include ethics frameworks to help identify ethically important considerations and structure reflection, checklists of ethical concerns that can be used to assess specific decisions, and methods for structuring ethical discussion among groups of stakeholders, including methods for reaching consensus decisions.¹

The CECs are an ethics framework for market-based change to the food system — that is, change that occurs in and through markets as a result of economic signals. Various tools for market-based change could be built around the CECs. The CECs could be used by producers and processors to assess their production practices and guide improvement. The CECs could also form the foundation of guidance for investors, to help them direct investment towards companies engaged in ethically preferable practices. Advocacy groups could also use the CECs as a framework to help them clarify their priorities and to assess the progress being made by producers and companies.

Many contemporary commercial food transactions are multinational in structure, creating a web of ethically significant connections that span the globe. Ideally, a set of Core Ethical Commitments would be equally at home anywhere in the world. We cannot claim that to be the case with this set of CECs. While we hope that some if not most of the commitments are universally endorsable, the experience, worldviews and subject matter expertise of our academic team, key advisors, and of the stakeholders consulted skewed predominantly towards North America and to a lesser degree Europe.

Additionally, because legal regimes and regulatory standards differ so significantly across international boundaries, acting in accordance with some CECs may be a relatively straightforward matter of legal obligation and compliance in one region but may conflict with prevailing policy imperatives in another. Thus, while we aimed to create broadly applicable CECs, we also wanted the statements to be straight-forward and minimally burdened by the kinds of caveats that would be necessary to capture the nuances of different national and political-economic contexts.

Thus, at this point the CECs are most readily applicable to the United States context. By this, we mean that they work best when used to guide decision making by actors operating in, designing products for, or selling products to consumers in the United States. Similarly, the CECs may serve as a more useful framework for consumers in the United States than in other parts of the world. Nevertheless, we anticipate that the CECs may also prove to be a useful tool in other national and regional contexts, especially if refined through a process of stakeholder engagement featuring a diverse group of context-relevant stakeholders.

One reason why the CECs are not a comprehensive blueprint for an ethical food system is that they were developed primarily as a tool for participants in markets: a tool for consumers to decide which products to buy, a tool for producers and processors to use in changing their production practices, and a tool for distributors and retailers to inform sourcing and stocking standards in ethically desirable ways. Because regulation by states and global trade agreements help to shape markets, this tool may also be effectively used to inform or reform regulations and the enforcement discretion of regulators.

However, while we hope that this tool will be useful in accelerating market-based change of the food system, this does not mean that we think market-based change alone can solve many of the ethical problems associated with the food system. Indeed, this tool should not be interpreted as an endorsement of the presently dominant system of food production and provisioning.

We recognize that the contemporary food system, which involves substantial trade across globalized markets, is, at once, an extraordinarily productive triumph and a source of staggering harms. Since 1961, the world population has doubled. This rate of growth, unprecedented in human history, features prominently in the narrative of the modern industrialized food system and gives rise to legitimate concern about how best to feed such a sizeable human population. As we grapple with the population problem, its long shadow often eclipses an even more staggering upward trend: the growth of international food commerce. Over the same period, the tonnage of food shipped between nations has increased fourfold and the value of international trade in food has more than tripled.

For those living in high-income countries, this long-distance food system offers the reassurance of well-stocked shelves and the delight that comes with an abundance of options regardless of the season. But the force of the global food system often displaces local economies, traditions, cuisines, varieties, and forms of agriculture. All too often, farmers producing for export sacrifice the use of their land to feed an insatiable global craving for more and varied foods, from staple commodities to sudden superfoods. At the same time, rising numbers of low-income urban dwellers in both developing and advanced economies live in undercapitalized neighborhoods that are unable to provide the kinds of margins that supermarkets have come to rely on, sharply limiting access to diverse and healthy food options. The global food market has undoubtedly succeeded in providing affordable abundance to many, but its successes have come with costs and have carved gaps of substantial ethical concern. Only some of these ethical concerns can be addressed through market-based action, and even then, only in part.

Thus, we acknowledge that the CECs do not form a blueprint for comprehensive change or ethical reform of the global food system. Comprehensive ethical reform requires policy change at the national and international level, and, arguably, reorientation of some economic goals. Ethical improvement of the food system also hinges on participatory and direct action strategies, community engagement, and multi-stakeholder dialog about the ethically important features of the food system and its significant impacts. In the opinion of some, including a number of the experts who consulted or worked on this project, radical change to the structure of markets and political systems, including international governance, is also essential.

Although this tool is primarily designed to accelerate market-based shifts toward a more ethical food system, organizations and individuals focused on driving more sweeping forms of change–including those who favor community-based, sovereignty-oriented, and extra-market measures for satisfying human food needs–may also find it valuable. This tool can and should also be usable by proponents of place-based, human-scale, and sovereignty-oriented food systems to assess the ethics of the alternatives they are working to create, guard against harms, and to catalyze consideration of ethical dilemmas inherent in the task of equitably and sustainably feeding a growing global population.

The CECs are premised on the notion that, in the near term, the food system will continue to be largely moved by the logic of capitalism in a globalized economy, and will feature substantial international trade of goods and exchange of knowledge. We neither endorse nor oppose this state of affairs. We assume that certain basic features of the global agrifood system will not change dramatically over the next few decades. Specifically, we assume that:

• There will continue to be global markets in agricultural inputs and products, food, and associated technology;
• Multi-national institutions and governance will not radically change or disband;
• Animal agriculture will continue to be a part of the food system; both the flesh and the products of livestock and certain wild species will continue to be part of human diets;
• Commodity markets and futures trading in food will continue to exist; and
• Nations with substantial roles in and influence over the global food system (including the United States) will continue to have largely market-based economies and will, to varying degrees, embrace free markets in food and agriculture;
• Globalized, regional, and localized food systems will coexist.

While the CECs were developed with these assumptions in the background, the tool does not destabilize if there are some shifts. For example, if, in line with many recommendations for more sustainable diets, the consumption of animal-source foods is reduced (but not eliminated), the CECs regarding animal welfare remain relevant; they would simply apply to a smaller number of products and may be pertinent to fewer consumers. Likewise, even if the rates of local food consumption rise dramatically, displacing some internationally traded foods in the diets of consumers, most of the CECs remain applicable to local producers.

The Core Ethical Commitments are not meant to be comprehensive. Many ethically important aspects of food production and consumption were not included on the list. Our only claim here is that each of the CECs we have enumerated is an important component of an ethical food system that is amenable to change in the near term. We view this list of CECs as both evolving over time and as open to expansion by others. We hope that it will inspire a more inclusive and sophisticated dialog about food ethics, which will inform subsequent iterations of the CECs as they evolve.

The CECs are written, first and foremost, with the aim of guiding food sector actors in thinking through, prioritizing, and establishing a distinctive set of ethical commitments to guide their practices. The CECs can also be used by consumers in developing and actualizing their ethical values related to food. We recommend that consumers reading through the CECs “flip” the obligation. For example, consumers are rarely in a position to determine or directly influence whether the “use of inputs, such as fertilizers and pesticides, is appropriate and judicious.” However, consumers can seek out foods produced by companies that provide information — directly or through participation in credible third-party certification programs — about the type and extent of inputs used. In their purchasing, consumers can favor products and producers that both offer transparency about inputs and demonstrate a commitment to judicious use.

We also recommend that consumers consider how different types of foods and different overall dietary patterns align with the CECs of most concern to them. Broadly speaking, plant-based foods will generally fare better on many of the “Environment and Resources” CECs, as compared to animal-source foods–and, of course, they will also fare better on “Animal Welfare” CECs. Thus, consumers who wish to better align their overall dietary pattern with those CECs could consider reducing consumption of animal-source foods in favor of plant-based foods.

Consistent with the broad generalization that production of plant-based foods has fewer negative environmental impacts than animal-source foods, there are significant differences between types of plant-based food. For example, production of almonds uses approximately 4 times more water than the production of pistachios and 17 times more water than production of peanuts.² There are also differences between types of animal-source food. The emissions from a serving of red meat are, for example, 5.25 times higher than from a serving of chicken.³ Thus, consumers could also consider shifting consumption from some types of plant-based foods to others, and from some types of animal-source foods to others.

In addition, for a given food (i.e. beef or almonds), typically there are significant differences in environmental impact (along various dimensions) between the best-performing and the worst-performing producers.⁴ Accordingly, consumers who wish to shape their dietary patterns to optimize performance related to a particular set of CECs may wish to favor or avoid certain categories of food altogether and to select from other categories only when they are able to determine that certain production practice are used or eschewed.

The CECs were developed over a two-year period. Seven academic researchers from the United States and Europe were commissioned to write white papers laying out significant ethical concerns with food production and consumption in their area of expertise (e.g. environment, public health, animal welfare, labor, crops and horticulture, water, and food safety). Drawing on the content of these white papers, and through discussion over a two-day meeting in March 2017, the project team and content area experts identified a preliminary set of ethical concerns, or Core Ethical Commitments. Over the ensuing year, these preliminary CECs were further refined through continued analysis and discussion, as well as in response to initial feedback from attendees at one small workshop and one public symposium.

The next step in the development of the CECs is for a broadly inclusive set of stakeholders to assess the CECs as a tool for market-based change. This process was begun at the Choose Food Symposium in November 2018, but should be expanded to include diverse food system actors (farmworkers, farmers, distributors, investors, consumers, etc.) who represent a range of demographics and identities. Subjecting the CECs to an inclusive process of thorough vetting by diverse stakeholders will help ensure that subsequent versions of the CECs accommodate different value systems and serve as a useful tool for a wider range of food system actors.

Another further step in the development of the CECs is having each commitment explicated by subject matter experts in more detail. These explications will involve several elements: defining key concepts used in the commitment; clarifying exceptions to the commitment; identifying practices that do and do not satisfy the commitment; and listing additional resources of use when thinking about and implementing that commitment, such as links to relevant important empirical work, and relevant laws, voluntary agreements and guidance documents. The CECs are intentionally expansive, and while they can be used in their current form to guide thinking, they will become increasingly actionable and valuable across a range of applications as they are explicated by a range of experts with deep subject matter expertise in each topic.