Governing Biosecurity in a Neoliberal World: Comparative Perspectives from Australia and the United Kingdom

Abstract

Intemational trade poses a serious and growing threat to biosecurity through the introduction of invasive pests and disease: these have adverse impacts on plant and animal health and public goods such as biodiversity, as well as food production capacity. While intemational govemmental bodies such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) recognise such threats, and permit govemments to protect human, animal, and plant life or health, such measures must not be applied in a way that is restrictive to trade. This raises a fundamental (but little-examined) tension between effective biosecurity govemance and the neoliberal priorities of intemational trade. In this paper we examine how such tensions play out in the different politieal and geographical contexts of Australia and the United Kingdom. A comparative approach enables close scrutiny of how trade liberalisation and biosecurity are coconstituted as compatible objectives as well as the tensions and contradictions involved in making these domains a single govemable problem. The comparative analysis draws attention to the policy challenges facing Australia and the UK in goveming national biosecurity in a neoliberal world. These challenges reveal a coiriplex geopolitics in the ways in which bioseeurity is practised, institutionalised, and debated in each country, with implications for which pests and diseases are defmed as threats and, therefore, which commodities are permitted to move across national borders. Despite efforts by the WTO to govem biosecurity as a technical matter of risk assessment and management, and to harmonise national practices, we contend that actual biosecurity practices continue to diverge between states depending on perceptions of risk and hazard, both to agricultural production and to rural environments as a whole, as well as unresolved tensions between intemationalised neoliberalism and domestic concems.

Designing local institutions for cooperative pest management to underpin market access: the case of industry-driven fruit fly area-wide management

“…Nowadays pests are spreading at an increased rate due to rising international movement related to trade and tourism activities (Maye et al 2012). Governments and agriculture industries in contemporary society use a relatively new term when they refer to this challenge, namely biosecurity.…”

“…International trade is a key driver for implementing national and international agricultural biosecurity strategies (Maye et al 2012). International and national legal and regulatory biosecurity measures are in place for the prevention, eradication and control of pests (Outhwaite 2010).…”

Balancing collaboration with coordination: Contesting eradication in the Australian plant pest and disease biosecurity system

“…In most real world problems involving multiple stakeholders with competing interests, perfect cooperation is highly unlikely, and instead coordination in making and implementing decisions requires a good deal of contestation (Berardo and Scholz 2010;Lubell et al 2010). We study the management of plant and pest outbreaks in agriculture, where the logistics of attempting coordinated, science-based eradication is set within the context of: industries and states contesting who will pay for response efforts (Beale et al 2008); national Governments balancing free-trade (Maye et al 2012); and the otherwise diverging interests of multiple biosecurity stakeholders (Gilmour et al 2011;Reed and Curzon 2015;Farbotko et al 2016). Contestation and coordina-tion are both features of how plant and pest outbreaks are managed, and successful eradication will depend on a better understanding of the roles they each play.…”

Assessing awareness of tree pests and pathogens amongst tree professionals: A pan-European perspective

“…We focus on Europe as it provides an important regulatory and trade context for plant health and biosecurity for tree professionals in member states (MacLeod et al 2010;Maye et al 2012;Eschen et al 2015b) -and brings with it substantial interdependence and connectivity between these key stakeholders. Plants and plant products imported into European Union (EU) member states are required to have a phytosanitary certificate issued by the exporting country -indicating that certain criteria such as phytosanitary inspections have been met (Jones and McLeod 2013).…”