President Obama announced in his weekly radio address (Saturday, March 14) the formation of a new advisory group to coordinate food safety laws and recommend changes to these laws (see the following article). The President makes the typical claims of the food safety system being “too spread out”, with resulting difficulty in sharing information and solving problems. He goes on to say that there are not nearly enough FDA workers or enough money for the FDA “to conduct inspections at more than a fraction of the 150,000 food processing plants and warehouses in the country.” The President stated, ”That is a hazard to public health. It is unacceptable. And it will change under the leadership of Dr. Margaret Hamburg,” his nominee for FDA commissioner.
The President bases his views on a common but fallacious assumption, which is that government is the most capable and efficient mechanism for assuring the safety of the food supply. He claims that, while he doesn’t believe government has the answer to every problem, there are some things that “only the government can do”, such as ”ensuring that the foods we eat and the medicines we take are safe and don’t cause us harm.” But is it really true that “only the government” (that is, the federal government) can ensure the safety of our food and our medicine? A look at the FDA’s record in the most recent well-publicized crisis, the recent peanut salmonella case, calls this view into question.
David Kramer, in an item at lewrockwell.com, points out that the FDA uncovered several violations of healthy safety laws at the Georgia peanut processing plant (Peanut Corporation of America), including the potential of products being exposed to insecticides. FDA inspectors found similar violations nearly eight years later, when they returned for the first time since the prior inspection in 2001. There was no follow-up to the 2001 visit. It seems very difficult to believe, as Kramer points out, that such a time-lag was on account of the FDA’s being underfunded and understaffed. Kramer goes on to suggest a much better way of investigating food safety, in a hypothetical illustration of a retailer (Kroger in his example) sending out its own food inspectors to examine a food processing plant (or else hiring an independent food inspection firm).
There is more to the story yet, as it also turns out that the FDA was aware of a contaminated international shipment of peanuts from the same peanut processing plant, according an Associated Press report dated January 30, 2009. The peanuts from the shipment, which occurred weeks before the earliest signs of the salmonella case, were returned, but the FDA did not follow up with an investigation.
The plot thickens further, with information in another article revealing that the president of the Peanut Corporation of America actually “serves on an industry advisory board that assists the U.S. Department of Agriculture in setting quality standards for peanuts. Stewart Parnell, the president of Peanut Corporation of America, was initially appointed to the USDA’s Peanut Standards Board in July 2005. He was reappointed in October 2008 for a second term that will continue until June 2011.” The article reveals:
The Peanut Standards Board was created by the 2002 Farm Bill and also advises the secretary of the USDA on “standards intended to assure that satisfactory quality and wholesome peanuts are used in the domestic and import peanut markets,” according to the USDA.
The article further reveals:
The Peanut Standards Board is comprised completely of volunteers and isn’t directly involved with food-safety issues. Its main duties are advising the USDA about how to grade and classify peanuts after they come out of the field. This involves setting the sizes for different peanuts and standards for how much moisture peanuts should contain before they are allowed onto store shelves. The board also helps set “quality and handling standards” for domestic and imported peanuts.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that there is significant government-corporate collusion taking place in this particular notorious example, with the typical result that the corporate interest receives special protection from the government. This is but one aspect of the folly of relying upon a government regulatory agency (accompanied by “industry advisory boards”) for safety of food and drugs. The real effect of such a regulatory approach is to provide special favors and protections to large corporate entities, at the expense of smaller, more independent operations, and at the expense of the public health.
Another problem with reliance on a government regulatory agency such as the FDA, as Kramer points out, is that the money to fund its operations is collected by force (i.e., taxes), as opposed to being paid for by voluntary means. Thus, there is no accountability. We as taxpayers have no choice in the matter. Kramer puts it this way:
This Georgia plant catastrophe is a no-win situation for the people (both Liberals and Conservatives) who believe that only government can protect us from problems in the private sector. Here’s why:
If these people think that the EIGHT YEAR gap was due to underfunding, well since the FDA has still been around since 2001, the FDA obviously had enough time and money to send out notices (how about cheap, fast, efficient paperless emails?) alerting all food retailers of the initial situation at the Georgia plant—but warning the retailers that the FDA is so underfunded that it won’t be able to do a follow-up visit for EIGHT YEARS. (You would think that, at the very least, it is the FDA’s responsibility and professional duty to do this.)
If underfunding of the FDA was not the issue, then if an EIGHT YEAR gap for a follow-up visit to a plant that had some problems (regardless of how serious or benign the problems were) on a previous inspection is the standard operating procedure at the FDA, then I hope this shows to these same Liberals and Conservatives that this is what happens when you have only one entity—which you are FORCED to pay for and CANNOT compete with—impose its standards on what are, in actuality, your responsibilities to your customers.
EIGHT YEARS??!! If a private inspection firm operated as irresponsibly and unprofessionally like this, do you think that the Federal Government, the sick victims, and the families of the dead victims would blame only the Georgia plant for this tragedy?
An important moral in the tragedy of the peanut salmonella case (along with similar cases) is that we cannot look to government to protect us from these kinds of things. A centralized government bureaucracy, by its very nature is incapable of performing the task of ensuring food safety with any satisfactory degree of efficiency. Furthermore, the nature of the regulatory state always results in industry “experts” (typically the corporate executives of the industry being regulated) being brought in to serve on “advisory boards” or other capacities to help write the regulations in such a manner as to be favorable to the industry in question. This only breeds more corruption, and imperils the health and safety of consumers as both retailers and consumers alike come to assume that “everything is OK because the government is protecting us.”
President Obama, along with many in Congress (of both parties, I might add), would have us believe that the answer to food and drug safety lies in granting more power, more money and more personnel to the FDA. On the contrary, such a course of action would more likely lead to further compromises in food safety by reinforcing the dependency upon government for these tasks, unavoidably further enhancing the degree of corruption that such a system breeds.
A much better system would be one in which retailers and food distributers have their own food inspection departments, from which personnel can be sent regularly to inspect the operations of food processing facilities. Such departments, along with independent food inspection firms, would be in a far better position of monitoring the safety of food production. Results of inspections would be publicized regularly in print media and on the internet. Any food processing company that refused to allow access to these private inspectors would run the risk of being exposed for having refused such access. Had such a system been in place, instead the current system which relies on the FDA, it is almost certain that the peanut salmonella incident would not have occurred, or that at least it would have been contained on a much smaller scale. Clearly this was an incident that could have been prevented, all the more so without the reliance of a large, inefficient government bureaucracy.
None of this is to say that there shouldn’t be laws regarding food safety. In fact, there are and should be laws on the books to hold food processors accountable for endangering the health of consumers with unsafe products. However, the regulatory state is the least efficient and most potentially corruptible mechanism for ensuring food safety. If government is to be involved at all in such inspections, it should be at the local level, where it can be (and often is) done with much greater efficiency and accountability. But even better is the approach suggested here of relying on private food inspectors who are held accountable to consumers, and not to a corrupt government-industrial complex that manages to get off scot-free most of the time.
The more we rely on government for safety, the less safe we are likely to be. We as consumers need to take responsibility and ownership of the process of food safety. A bottom-up, decentralized consumer-driven process of food safety inspection will lead to far better and more consistent results than a cumbersome, top-down centralized process. President Obama and the Congress need to be presented with a bottom-up, consumer-driven, freedom-based approach to solving our food and drug safety issues.