hello i'm delighted to be with you uh my name is uh michael roberts and i'm the
professor of law and the executive director of the resnick center for food loan policy at ucla
school of law let me start off by giving you a little introduction because i think
introducing the wrestling center will help segue nicely into my short remarks and will also provide
a valuable context as to how important it is to deal with food fraud and the complexities at least
in the in the legal side the ucla resident center for food law and policy has been around for about
uh seven years now and it along with other law schools around the country have discovered
uh the importance of food law and this is a uh an area of law that's really taken uh up interest in
students as well as faculty and scholars around the country and in other countries as well
one of the core issues in food law is our ability ability to keep food from being adulterated and
there are many multiple meanings and definitions of adulteration one of those meanings or
definitions is the uh is the when food has become um fraudulent in by a variety of different ways
it suddenly becomes adulterated and it runs afoul of the law in most countries including the us
this may seem like a very simple concept but food fraud is incredibly complicated
and one of the reasons why it caught my attention as a as an academic years ago is my interest in
food law history and it's well known that this area of regulating food has
been a problem for centuries you go all the way back to the roman empire for example
and other ancient civilizations there is clear evidence of the efforts by the government
to regulate the food fraud and believe it or not this actually covers honey that ron was talking
about in his presentation as a case study example along with wine and bread and other products
and so the food fraud has been is i call it is both old and it's new it's new in a sense because
it has grown in its complexity and the problem itself has grown
due to these our modern global food system which is really comprised of
all these different food trade lines that are very complicated and i refer to it as a maze
and it certainly is a maze and it enhances the ability of fraudsters to commit fraud and to con
and to render food different than what consumers expect it to be
so some of the activities that we've been involved in here at ucla include publications presentations
and also collaboration with governments around the world literally around the world on this issue
here's a few of the publications that address food fraud that we are responsible for publishing here
at the resident center there's a treatise food law in the united states that i published some
years ago that was the first treatise of its kind on food law the first chapter deals with
food fraud or what we call in the united states economically motivated adulteration
another publication on the far right was a publication by myself and a fellow at the center
the pursuit of food authenticity now food authenticity is kind of the positive way
of saying a food fraud is how do we make food authentic in order for it not to be fraudulent
and so this is a white paper that cover all of the food products uh that have a problem with fraud
and uh some of the legal remedies that we suggested
the other paper in the middle is a paper that we recently published in working with
the honey industry and i was so pleased to have hooked up with the honey industry
as one of our our collaborators because it's an industry that's that's ripe with fraud and an
industry that has clear lines of demarcation what i mean by that is there are producers of honey who
clearly are hurting from the fraud and there are the fraudsters who mingle with these producers
in many different ways including through trade and the who perpetuate the fraud or at least uh do not
take steps to remedy the problem of fraud um the this particular paper was interesting because it
took a ecosystem approach to the problem of food fraud i'm going to try to explain this very simply
because i want to move on but in essence when the fraud honey fraud actually threatens the ecosystem
and how does it do that well when the one of the things that we're leaving out of this equation
is what i call the endangered honey producer when fraud is committed the price of honey
falls for producers it so happens that these producers actually wear two hats in the
united states and in other countries they not only produce honey but they're also the managers of the
honeybee colonies the honeybees that go out and pollinate pollination is the key to our ecosystem
without pollination we lose much of our food supply there are a lot of scientists and a
lot of folks who are very concerned about the disappearance of honeybees
but give little attention to the disappearance of the honeybee producer which again is the manager
of these pollinators so without going into the complexities involved in this economic dynamic
one can say very assuredly that in order to keep pollination thriving in order to make sure that we
pollinate our orchards our farms our fields or and everywhere else around around the world we need
managers of pollinators and these are the honeybee producers europe recognized this actually a few
years ago and passed a resolution that recognized the connection between honey fraud and pollination
and so this is what we call in in as we look at policy and food as an unintended consequence
i'm sure it's not a consequence that fraudsters intended but it certainly is a real consequence
and this paper addresses that problem and offers up some policy and legal recommendations
as i mentioned to you in addition to the publications we also collaborate here at ucla
and one of our key collaborating partners is the united nations food and agriculture organization
also known as the fao which is headquartered in rome italy
the fao is a very interesting organization it is an organization that's comprised of over 170
member nations and it really is key to the setting of food standards around the world
and in the research of food and agriculture on many different levels it's an amazing organization
with thousands of people who are involved in it day in and day out
and has the respect of of national governments and institutions around the world this organization
the fao entered into a partnership with our law school here at ucla for us to
offer our legal services on various projects one of the projects that the fao has engaged
in recently is looking at food fraud now this is interesting for a lot of different reasons
when the fao is interested in a project it usually it comes through pressure from member
countries and i think it illustrates that member countries including the united states and all
the countries around the world are becoming very concerned about food fraud for a number of reasons
and so this collaboration therefore has allowed us to contribute to this project
and we are now writing a major brief uh with the legal department at the fao uh that will be
uh presented at some point to another organization that was created by the fao and the world health
organization known as the codex alimentarius commission which is the setter of standards for
food for food regulation for countries around the world and those who engage in
trade a multilateral trade and again an extremely important organization so what i want to do is
just outline for you briefly some of the lessons i've learned in in putting together this brief
for the food and agricultural organization and it's rather complicated it's a very long brief
and i'm going to try to condense it into its most simplest terms and briefest terms as possible so
note one again going back to my first point this is a very complicated problem very complicated
because it involves a lot of different players a lot of different motivations a lot of different
countries and a lot of different ways of cheating and and also before we forget
it's complicated because of consumers consumers want to know that their food is authentic
but there are really difficult it's really difficult sometimes to communicate to consumers
uh and most of the communication to consumers really quite frankly takes place
over with a food label that's placed on a food product and trying to ensure that consumers
have adequate information and are not the victims of fraud is not an easy process
but one of the things that we've looked at here at ucla in connection with this briefing in general
is looking at international legal strategies and national legal strategies because again
it's a global problem and most of the a lot of the food that's for example including honey
that's fraudulent is food that's imported into a country and these are very often specialty crops
especially specialty goods but in other cases they're not they can also be
regular uh commodities or they can be homegrown products quite frankly but nevertheless that is
a sizable chunk of the problem when we look at the international strategies and again
my goal here is not to necessarily educate you on all of the legal machinations that go on here
but to give you an idea of the complexity and what's involved here but one of the first key
things that we have to do is define food fraud now you may think that's easy but it's not
and and this is something that governments around the world are struggling with how do you define it
what is it what does it look like it can range from anything from substituting product from a
for another product it can be taking something out of food that's of essence for that food product
it can be camouflaging different things that are in the product that we don't want to disclose it
can be part of the labeling it can be advertising there's a lot of different ways of committing
fraud so how do we define it in a way that everyone can agree on this is really important
because when the way you define it frames the issue and frames the way that governments approach
it now there's lots of other terms that we have to define like food authenticity or food integrity
or economically motivated adulteration which is a term that the us uses when it refers to food fraud
there are a number of different legal instruments that we don't have to get into but there's a
number of different agreements that countries have have agreed to where we agree with fair
fairness and trade for example and public health is a paramount concern to all countries that trade
these are in illegal instruments that can address food fraud that need to be
defined a little bit better i think there's also really interesting development in what we call the
regulation of global food value chains now what i mean by this again are these global chains where
you have for example with honey coming in from different parts of the world coming into different
chains that are then blended and merged into other honey from other places that end up in the grocery
store on the shelf and this is not just honey this is with all products it's amazing to know how many
different cows for example could be respond in different countries could be responsible for the
hamburger patty that you might buy at the store or orange juice can come from lots of different
countries in that carton you might purchase at the grocery store so these are complicated chains but
there are a number of different ways that private companies have been getting involved and that's
one of the things that we're hopeful with for example in honey is that private retailers will
get interested in this product because they are the gatekeepers for consumers in many respects
but in food especially with food safety there's a history of using transnational contracts
contracts that ensure that food is safe we can do the same thing with authenticity of food product
or public private contracts and approaches and levels of cooperation most experts in food fraud
believe that it's going to take a combination of public private partnership to resolve this problem
all right national legal strategies again defining is really really important there's three key
pieces to defining food fraud in my estimation one is that it's intentional it can't be accidental
it has to be intentional somebody intends to commit the fraud secondly there has to be a
level of deception in other words we we intend to deceive consumers and why do we intend to deceive
consumers because we want to gain an undue advantage we want to have an economic benefit
so for example a terrorist who who infects food or commits fraud is not necessarily
committing food fraud as defined because they won't be gaining an undue advantage
or an economic advantage somebody who commits food fraud accidentally also would not fall
into this definition so it really is a definition that has three critical components there's a lot
of different legal strategies that are involved in dealing with food fraud everything from prevention
which most experts tend to think is the best strategy to criminalizate criminalization
should we criminalize food fraud and what would be the consequences this is actually a really
interesting approach because it's something that we typically don't do in a food system
but it raises a specter of a lot of different ideas and approaches we typically look at we
link food fraud with food safety which has its pros and cons labeling is another way to be able
to if we have certified labels that actually work to ensure for the consumer that the food product
they're buying is what they think it is that could be an interesting tool identity standards
this is what ron was talking about with honey is coming up with standards that we can then use
to effectively measure and evaluate food product and we can do this through testing sophisticated
testing that can be developed at universities or in partnership with government and private
and finally consumer protection one of the key ways actually of dealing with food fraud is your
consumer protection statutes or here in the united states it could be through litigation litigation
could be a valuable tool it is a challenging tool because again these products are coming in from
different countries and that's not an easy thing to be able to navigate in the world of litigation
and so i hope that i've been able to at least tell you one thing today and that is how complicated
this problem is and it's going to require an immense effort by governments by private sector
and then finally the most important piece to this is that it's going to be up really up to
the consumer to demand product that's authentic and sometimes i think we put way too much
responsibility on the poor consumer i've always said when a consumer goes into a grocery store
they need to take with them a food nutritionist they need to take with them a food scientist and
they need to take with them a lawyer in order to make sure they know what's on the box what
it means and then whether they're reading something that's accurate or not and what
they can do about it if it's not so buying food at the grocery store is not an easy exercise
but we put this overwhelming burden on the consumers and expect a lot out of you
and and that's and i'm sorry for that but that's the way it is but consumers are going to have to
step up and demand authentic food product and in that way the market will respond the consumer is
the ultimate arbiter of food products so i want to thank you and hope that we all can look forward to
a future of eating not only safe and wholesome products but also authentic food products