Paper short abstract:

By outlining what regulatory compliance means for how U.S.-based food importers and brokers do their jobs, this paper reveals how risk-based analytics turns border control into a practice of auditing information that circulates apart from, yet remains essential to, the material goods it indexes.

Paper long abstract:

A “paradigm shift” is underway in U.S. government oversight of food safety and biosecurity. Previously, food safety import regulation was premised on keeping contaminants out of the national food supply by securing the border through surveillance and import refusals. However, as the volume of global trade soars, border control measures have turned many U.S. ports of entry into “chokepoints” where the flow of commerce encountered costly friction. The transformative 2011 Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) has shifted “the focus … from responding to contamination to preventing it.” Today, the metabolic politics of American food safety and biosecurity are enacted less by keeping “bad stuff” out than by extending the threshold of the regulatory zone outwards, such that (as a U.S. Food and Drug Administration commissioner said in 2012) “regulated products know no borders.” Legally, U.S.-based importers must now be able to verify that their international suppliers meet safety standards set by U.S. agencies. Thus, what’s metabolically absorbed into the U.S. today is not just sanctioned foodstuff but entire food industries. Drawing on ethnographic research within the specialty cheese industry, this paper outlines what FSMA compliance means for how U.S.-based food importers, and the customs brokers they hire, do their jobs. In doing so, it reveals how border control, in employing risk-based analytics, has become a practice of audit, of evaluating information that circulates quite apart from, yet remains essential to, the material goods it indexes.