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Purnhagen, Kai:
Misery acquaints a man with strange bed-fellows? Consumer empowerment in EU agricultural law and EU food information law.
In: Cardwell, Michael ; Smith, Fiona ; McMahon, Joseph
(Hrsg.):
A Research Agenda for Agricultural Law. -
Cheltenham
: Edward Elgar
,
2025
Abstract
EU agricultural law has limited rules on consumer empowerment. Consumer empowerment has primarily been a task of classical EU internal market law. When looking at foodstuffs, this area of law is covered by what we know as EU food law. In this contribution, I will illustrate how agricultural law is influencing EU food information law, which hosts the major provisions of EU consumer empowerment. Both legal regimes, EU agricultural law as well as EU food information law, suffer from “misery,” which the mutual borrowing of rationales of the respective other legal regimes should cure. I will illustrate this effect with the example of food innovation labelling. I conclude that, despite of the fact that both areas ¬agricultural law and food law¬ have developed in different directions and follow different logics, the attempt to cure these miseries by mutual implementation of EU agricultural law into EU food information law and vice versa has three effects: Agricultural law cures the unwanted effects of consumer empowerment in food information law by bringing back the consideration of producers’ interest into the interpretation of food information law; as producers’ interest feature more prominent in agricultural law, consideration of agricultural provisions illustrates the limits of food information law. By considering both, producers’ and consumers’ interest, such an interpretation may be better suited to serve consumers’ interest, as otherwise production may be at risk and ultimately there will be no food to choose from. At the same time, however, consideration of agricultural law may block the effective development of empowerment, particularly with a view of innovative foods. When implementing sustainability in EU agricultural policy, however, labelling would benefit from a stronger recognition of the rationales of EU food information law. This would require to reconcile the legal relationship between the increasingly overlapping regimes. A normative approach to consumer empowerment in EU agricultural law with a view to establish more sustainability would require changing the consumer information approach from a process-related to a product-related approach by which it would be easier for consumers to choose the more sustainably produced product.