No abstract

This article presents an analysis of the Farm to Fork Strategy (F2F Strategy) on animal welfare matters though the lens of EU trade policy and public participation. It shows that the mix of cooperation tools contained in bilateral agreements with trade components support in aggregate the Strategy's actions on animal welfare. However, individual bilateral agreements may need to be renegotiated and modernised to include more powerful cooperation tools to achieve sustainable food systems through the adoption and implementation of animal welfare standards. One way of achieving this is to negotiate the inclusion of sustainable food systems chapters that highlight the linkages between animal welfare, agriculture, sustainability, climate, environment, and public health. However, such robust chapters should be monitored and enforced in a correspondingly robust manner, for example, by restructuring chapters' committees and work groups. The article concludes that enhanced public participation, both at the level of legislative proposals (public consultations) and at the level of trade policy (domestic advisory groups, standardisation committees), may better support achieving policy Ciar an Burke, Professor and Senior Research Fellow, Jena Center for Reconciliation Studies, Friedich Schiller University and Legal Officer, EFTA Surveillance Authority. The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone, and do not represent the position of the EFTA Surveillance Authority.

What type of enforcement is the most effective to punish violations of food law or to prevent them from occurring in the first place? This article examines the question of which mix of private and public enforcement exists in European Union (EU) food law and whether this mix corresponds to the recommendations of existing social science research. Based on this research, we contend that EU-determined enforcement mechanisms differ in effectiveness across Member States. New technologies have the potential to stimulate a novel mix of public and private enforcement tools at the EU and national levels.