FRANCK L. B. MEIJBOOM, TATJANA VISAK, and FRANS W. A. BROMFROM TRUST TO TRUSTWORT HINESS: WHY INFORMATIONIS NOT ENOUGH IN THE FOOD SECTOR(Accepted in revised form August 30, 2005)ABSTRACT. The many well-publicized food scandals in recent years haveresulted in a general state of vulnerable trust. As a result, building consumer trusthas become an important goal in agri-food policy. In their efforts to protect trustin the agricultural and food sector, governments and industries have tended toconsider the problem of trust as merely a matter of informing consumers on risks.In this article, we argue that the food sector better addresses the problem of trustfrom the perspective of the trustworthiness of the food sector itself. This broadidea for changing the focus of trust is the assumption that if you want to betrusted, you should be trustworthy. To provide a clear understanding of whatbeing trustworthy means within the food sector, we elaborate on both the conceptof trust and of responsibility. In this way we show that policy focused onenhancing transparency and providing information to consumers is crucial, but notsufficient for dealing with the problem of consumer trust in the current agri-foodcontext.KEY WORDS: food, food policy, responsibility, trust, trustworthiness1. INTRODUCTIONConsumer trust has received substantial attention in recent years. Severallarge EU-funded research projects on consumer trust in food had beenexecuted (cf. Poppe and Kjaernes, 2003; Romano, 2005), national foo dauthorities as well as the European EFSA have prioritized strengthening orrebuilding public trust as one of their core aims (e.g., FSA, 2001), and evenglobal organizations have began to seriously deal with issues of trust (FAO,2003). This raises the question of why this issue gets so much attention. If wetake the growing expertise in the field of risk analysis and assessment andthe increasing reliability of safety studies into account, one would expect theopposite trend. A closer look at the agri-food sector, however, shows threegeneral characteristics that can explain why trust is still an issue in spite ofthe growing expertise in the field of risk analysis (cf. Brom, 2002).First, we are confronted with the development and application of newtechnologies, like biotechnology and more specifically genetic modification.Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics (2006) 19:427–442DOI 10.1007/s10806-006-9000-2 Ó Springer 2006These advancements yield novel products and ways of production where thecriteria of evaluation and acceptability are not clear beforehand. Moreover,technological innovation is related to the blurring of borders between foodand medicine and the introduction of health-related novel foods thatinfluences the food sector.A second development is the growing distance, in both time and space,between production and consumption. This often co nfronts consumers withthe feeling of a loss of control of their ability of choice in food selection.Consumers often feel dependent on practices that are out of their directcontrol and, yet, are very important to them. The globalizing character ofthe agricultural and food sector only confirms this feeling: production offood is often a long, anonymous process in which large-scale industry farms,multinational processing industries, and supermarkets are involved.Third, the food sector has been strongly associated with a number offood-related scandals and affairs, like BSE in beef, dioxins in chicken, sal-monella in eggs, and the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease. More thanonce the effect of these incidences on public trust has been mentioned (FAO/WHO, 1998; FSA, 2001, p. 24; FAO, 2003). The FAO, for instance, statesthat highly publicized food safety problems ‘‘have given rise to a generalstate of distrust among consumers’’ (2003, p. 3).Because of these characteristics of the sector, dealing with risk,1uncer-tainty, and igno rance have become part and parcel of everyday life. As aconsumer, one has to depend on the expertise of others, the checks andbalances within the supply chain, and first and foremost on the goodwill ofanonymous people and institutions involved in the agri-food sector. Thishighlights the importance of trust in this sector, which is a way to deal withuncertainty and lack of personal control. As long as trust exists, the lack ofcontrol is often not experienced, or at least not considered as an unpleasantvulnerability. However, the increasing number of food scandals and out-breaks of diseases have made trust vulnerable. This does not imply thatthere is a crisis of confidence in scientific and technological institutions inEurope – in fact several reputable European surveys (e.g., Gaskell et al.,2003, p. 32) have shown evidence that this is not the case – but it does showthat trust has become vulnerable. The focus, therefore, shifts to how to dealwith trust in the current agri-food sector.In this article, we elaborate several steps that are crucial for an a ccountthat aims to address the problematic character of trust in the foodsector. First, we argue that the concept of trust deserves more elucidation.1Risk defined as the ‘‘chance hazard.’’ However, in several situations the extent andcontent of the risk we may face is not clear. In those cases, we have to deal with uncertainty oreven with ignorance. At uncertainty, we know that we do not know, in case of ignorance we donot even know that we do not know. See Jasanoff 2001.FRANCK L. B. MEIJBOOM ET AL.428However, the current problem regarding consumer trust is, as we will argue,not so much a problem of trust, but one of trustworthiness. Yet even whenfocus is turned toward trustworthiness, there still remains an incompletepicture of the problem. Since decisions on food-related risks are delegated toresponsible authori ties, like governm ent agencies and the food industries,responsibility is a key issue in relation to both trust and trustworthiness. Atthe end of the article, we focus on some implications of our analysis for agri-food policy.2. WHAT DO WE MEAN BY TRUST?When one tries to define the concept of trust, the diversity of prior defini-tions is striking. Shapiro has already mentioned that the considerableattention on trust has resulted in a ‘‘confusing potpourri of definitions’’(1987, p. 625). For instance, according to Hardi n (1993, 1996, 2002), we candefine trust as ‘‘encapsulated interest’’ in the sense that one