INTERNATIONAL ROUNDTABLE — FOOD INDUSTRY HARMS: ILLEGALITY, OPACITY, AND LAWFUL SOCIAL HARM

Session One · Food Industry Harms: Illegality, Opacity, and Lawful Social Harm

Boston College Law School, the Corporate Crime Observatory, Exeter Law School, and the Global Harmonization Initiative are pleased to announce Session One of the international roundtable "Food Industry, Law, and Society: Corporate Power, Public Health, and Accountability," to be held online via Zoom on Friday, 11 September 2026, at 08:00 Boston · 13:00 London · 14:00 Rome · 14:00 Cape Town · 15:00 Nairobi · 22:00 Sydney.

Registration is free and open to all: Register here

Full programme, panelist profiles, and topics for discussion: Food Industry, Law, and Society

About the Roundtable

The roundtable examines a central problem: food-industry harm cannot be understood adequately through food safety law alone. Harm may arise through conduct already recognized as unlawful, remain concealed despite existing legal and compliance systems, or result from products and commercial practices that continue to operate lawfully while potentially contributing to cumulative public-health or social harm.

To examine these different problems without collapsing them into a single category, the international roundtable is structured in two connected sessions. Session One, on September 11, 2026, focuses on identifying, understanding, and exposing different forms of food-industry harm. Session Two, on September 18, 2026, turns to the governance question: how law, regulation, enforcement, markets, and institutional arrangements can prevent or respond to the problems identified in the first discussion. The second session will therefore build directly on the issues emerging from the first.

SESSION ONE - FOOD INDUSTRY HARMS: ILLEGALITY, OPACITY, AND LAWFUL SOCIAL HARM (September 11, 2026)

Session One examines how food-industry harm is produced, concealed, exposed, and normalized, and why different forms of harm may generate very different forms of legal and institutional response. The discussion will move through three connected thematic areas:

1. Illegal Conduct and Integrity Failures in the Food Sector. The discussion will examine how different forms of food-sector wrongdoing are legally classified and addressed, why legal and enforcement systems may fail even where mandatory rules already exist, and how global supply-chain complexity, corruption, economic crime, organized crime, and cross-jurisdictional vulnerabilities can complicate detection and accountability.

2. Detection, Opacity, and Whistleblowing. This part will explore the information asymmetries that can make corporations operate as “black boxes,” the effectiveness and limits of compliance, auditing, certification, self-regulation, and internal reporting systems, and the role of whistleblowers, investigative journalists, regulators, lawyers, researchers, civil society, and other actors in bringing concealed information into public view and translating disclosure into accountability.

3. Lawful Social Harm and the Nutrition Gray Zone. The final area turns to the more difficult problem of products and commercial practices that remain lawful while potentially contributing to cumulative public-health or social harm. The discussion will address scientific uncertainty, regulatory differences across jurisdictions, consumer autonomy and market concentration, labeling and traceability, voluntary corporate responsibility, lobbying, corporate influence over scientific knowledge, and the narratives through which food-related risks are presented to the public.

The session is designed as an interactive, agenda-setting discussion among participants with different forms of professional and disciplinary expertise. Following Session One, the organizers will prepare a short synthesis identifying the principal harms, detection problems, and governance questions to be carried forward into Session Two.

Session One: Participants

Moderator: Diane Ring (Boston College Law School)

Organizers: Costantino Grasso (University of Exeter), Diana Bogueva (Global Harmonization Initiative), Yasmine Motarjemi, Diane Ring (Boston College Law School)

Panelists:

• Sasha Chavkin (The Examination, US)

• Maxime Chrétien (Ville de Genève; ACFE Switzerland)

• Jean Feminier-Bonhomme (Former corporate manager, formerly Nestlé, France)

• Tamryn Frank (University of the Western Cape, South Africa)

• Cynthia Gichiri (Africa Uncensored, Kenya)

• Mary Inman (Whistleblower Partners LLP, US)

• Filippa Juul (SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University, US)

• Federica Raffone (University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy)

• Alice Rizzuti (University of Hull, UK)

• Patti Rundall (Baby Milk Action / IBFAN, UK)

• Rémi Thévenot (Food engineer, writer and speaker, France)

• Milind Tiwari (Charles Sturt University, Australia)

• Federica Urso (Journalist, Italy)

• Andrew Wasley (The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, UK)

The discussions will be recorded for scientific and research purposes. #accountability #academia #adulteration #agrifood #antitrust #businessethics #CCO #compliance #consumerprotection #corporate #corporatecapture #corporatecrime #corporatecrimeobservatory #corporategovernance #corporatelaw #corporatepower #corporateresponsibility #corporation #corruption #csr #economiccrime #enforcement #exeter #food #foodcrime #foodfraud #foodindustry #foodlaw #foodpolicy #foodsafety #governance #journalism #labeling #law #legal #lobbying #nutrition #publichealth #regulation #roundtable #socialharm #supplychain #sustainability #transparency #ultraprocessedfood #whistleblowing