UMD researchers found mandatory food safety guidelines are necessary to safeguard public health
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Researchers from the University of Maryland reviewed the effects of food safety standards in the produce supply chain and found that, prior to the establishment of mandatory food safety rules, voluntary measures did not reduce food foodborne illness outbreaks and reduced only some food safety recalls. The research, which was published on January 17, 2022, in American Journal of Agricultural Economics, suggests that mandatory government safety protocols are necessary to safeguard public health.
“Food safety is the joint product of everybody who handles produce all along the supply chain,” said Erik Lichtenberg, a professor in the department of Agricultural & Resource Economics at UMD and the senior co-author of the paper. “If you can’t identify whose actions were at fault for a given foodborne illness or recall, no one entity in the supply chain really has any incentive to make sure things are safe. And in fact, our paper found that when growers voluntarily adopt safety standards, it does not lead to a safer food supply.”
In the 1990s and early 2000s, foodborne illness outbreaks led congress to pass the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2011 (FSMA), which allowed the FDA to mandate safety protocols all along the food supply chain. But by the time mandatory food safety rules were established in 2015, some grower associations and trade groups were already adopting voluntary measures to improve food safety.
Lichtenberg and his PhD students Aaron Adalja (’17) and Elina Page (’16) wanted to know what motivated growers to adopt safety protocols and if those voluntary measures were working. They dug into the data to find out.
The researchers compiled a list of all grower organizations to see if and when they developed safety standards for their members. Then they combed through all FDA recall notices from 2004 to 2013 and linked the recalls to the commodity. For example, if they saw a recall on spinach from a given region, they checked the organization representing spinach growers in that region to see what safety measures were adopted and when. The team then did the same thing with CDC data on foodborne illness outbreaks.
Their analysis revealed that only serious foodborne illness outbreaks resulting in hospitalizations moved the grower organizations to adopt safety measures. Strikingly, those measures had no impact on the number of subsequent outbreaks or recalls.
The researchers found some improvement in food safety when government-backed organizations such as agricultural check-off programs voluntarily adopted food safety guidelines. In such cases there were fewer recalls for food contamination but no impact on the number of foodborne illness outbreaks.
“Laws like the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2011 and its Produce Safety Rule are needed because action in the industry alone has been generally insufficient to achieve significant food safety improvements,” said Adalja, who was Lichtenberg’s PhD student when the study began and is now an assistant professor of food and beverage management at Cornell University.
The complexity of the produce supply chain is partly responsible for the challenges of safeguarding food through voluntary protocols. Produce is often aggregated from many different growers and passes through many hands before arriving in the grocery store. That makes tracing a foodborne pathogen to specific entities along the supply chain extremely difficult.
“With so many moving parts and so many individual, heterogeneous actors in the chain, not everyone is working in concert. It becomes difficult to reduce foodborne disease outbreaks or food recalls,” Adalja said. “If one grower does not meet the standards that all the other growers achieve, then all the growers suffer. The whole supply chain has to be coordinating.”
According to the research team, federal regulations like those in the FSMA’s Produce Safety Rule are an important way to ensure that all links in the supply chain are coordinated for food safety. The Produce Safety Rule’s latest standards require regular testing of agricultural water quality, training for proper employee health and hygiene, and rules for amending soil with animal manure – sources of produce contamination.
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In addition to Lichtenberg and Adalja, Page is a co-author of this study. Page is now at the Economic Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture.
This was supported in part by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economics Research Service, 2016 Innovative Research Grant, Cooperative Agreement No. 58-3000-6-0031, and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, Specialty Crop Research Initiative, Award No. 2011-51181-30767. This story does not necessarily reflect the views of these organizations.
