Food Governance durch Qualitätszertifizierungen

In diesem Beitrag wird das Potential von Qualitätszertifizierungen zur Förderung eines nachhaltigen oder ethisch verantwortlichen Lebensmitteleinkaufs, sowohl in Bezug auf VerbraucherInnen als auch Akteure des öffentlichen Beschaffungswesens, vorgestellt. Es wird gezeigt, dass Governance-basierte Qualitätszertifizierungen wie Label effiziente Kommunikationsinstrumente für nachhaltigkeitsorientierte Ernährung sein können, indem sie Ernährungskompetenz und nachhaltigeres Einkaufsverhalten bei potentiell widersprüchlichen Interessen fördern, insbesondere, wenn die Zertifizierung den Mehrwert des Produktes transparent aufzeigt und die definierten Nachhaltigkeitskriterien gesetzlich verpflichtend sind.

Political food communication may take many forms, including direct recommendations to public institutions and private households (cf. Reckinger/Régnier 2017), or more indirect labelling schemes that certify various types of quality – from sustainable via nutritious to ethical. The underlying governance claims differ in those cases: in the first one, priority is given to analytical, top-down information to procurement actors and to individuals of a given population; in the second one, action is rather taken in the direction of food production and transformation, be it top-down or participatory, with an associated effort to make the communicated guarantees transparent to consumers.
In this article, we will analyse in a praxeological perspective the contrasting governance claims that structure a selection of labelling schemes in contemporary Luxembourg: official ones (such as organic produce, among others), voluntary and regional ones, international ones, as well as supermarket brands blurring boundaries and using overlaps of several labels. We will compare the guarantees and transparency that labels tend to offer in the socio-ecological, socioeconomic, sociocultural and socio-political dimensions of food certification, viewed as a potentially enabling or disabling form of food communication. At the same time, we will examine the potential of these aids for individual consumers’ priorities and public procurement actors’ legal framework in selecting foodstuffs with added sustainable or ethical value, asking the question if such certifications are efficient tools of food communication and ultimately of an enhanced food literacy in an arena of potentially conflicting and crowded messages.