The gift and the trap of a standard

Abstract

International food safety standards coordinate trade by defining a single line between safe and unsafe. This essay argues that it is the binary structure of that line, rather than its strictness, that produces exclusion. For a national market situated far below the threshold, measurement documents failure long before it can demonstrate improvement, so the rational response is not to improve but not to look. The essay further argues that the two-tier arrangement usually invoked as a risk of flexibility already exists: international standards govern only food destined to cross a border into a wealthy market, while the overwhelming majority of what people in low-income countries eat moves through local and informal channels that no international rule touches. Drawing on the ratchet mechanism in climate governance, progressive realisation in human rights law, and harm reduction, it sketches what a converging alternative would have to contain — and argues that the deeper obstacle is a vocabulary of threat and policing applied to what is, in human terms, an act of care.