Standards, including food safety standards, have become a key tool in the governance of the world economy. The current drive to harmonize these standards on a global scale is supposed to reduce technical barriers to trade and create conditions for fair and free trade. However, as the case of the Polish meatpacking industry shows, standards often create new barriers because they are embedded in specific geographies. On the one hand, many harmonized standards favor large-scale multinational capital and bar local small-scale producers. On the other hand, the social legacies of previous economic systems—in this case, state socialism—give small-scale producers tools such as informal markets, personal social ties, and political organizing skills that can be used to create barriers for large multinational competitors.
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