dConservatives claim today that George Bush isn't really one of their own because the country has fallen so precipitously in so many regards. However, Bush does govern as a conservative and a radical one at that. Giving the government's responsibility to protect the people over to private industry has happened more rapidly in the last eight years than Reaganomics could hope for in the 1980s. Back then it was about giving back taxes to the wealthy and away from the programs to help the poor.
Now in 2008 the reforms of the 1930s and the progressive movement as a whole are under full-frontal assault. There are plenty of examples of this, the defense industry, airline safety and energy regulation to name a few. Every single sector of de-regulation is a serious national matter, but when it comes to the food we eat most Americans assume that the FDA and the USDA are looking out for our safety, but they'd be wrong. It isn't because the inspectors don't care, the reason is that there just aren't enough of them.
From US News:
From the first reports of a salmonella outbreak this spring, it took a full 89 days before jalapeño and serrano peppers correctly came under suspicion as the culprit. During that period, as more than 1,440 victims trickled in to hospitals, federal officials struggled to trace the source of the outbreak, erroneously singling out tomatoes for weeks before homing in on peppers. No sooner had that outbreak tapered off than the high-end Whole Foods Market was forced to launch a massive recall of E. coli-infested ground beef.The incidents prompted renewed calls for reform and stricter oversight of food safety. Some lawmakers are even suggesting stripping the Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture of their inspection duties and giving them to a new agency. Yet the FDA in particular has long been starved of funding and understaffed. Its workload, meanwhile, is rapidly expanding as the global food chain grows larger, more complicated, and less transparent, all of which adds to the agency's already overcrowded plate.
Congress is under pressure to take up major food-safety legislation this fall that would offer sweeping proposals for regulatory change. The country's appetite for reform, however, is likely to collide with an uncomfortable reality: The responsibility for food safety, as it works today, lies heavily in private hands. Even as bacterial outbreaks have become more high-profile and the financial fallout from recalls more severe, the government has been handing off many food-safety responsibilities to industry. Food safety today is a business—and a booming one at that.
Now strict economic conservatives should deem this a good thing. Less government regulation means that private industry will step in and help keep our food safe. The problem is that like most of conservative ideology, the market doesn't care about our safety, it only cares about one thing, profit.
The counter-argument is that you can only profit if you keep selling food and that food has to be safe in order for people to buy it. Not so fast though, the evidence in the last few years has shown that these agribusiness giants have taken plenty of missteps at our expense and when people get sick (and some that die) the FDA is used as a scapegoat, but the real problem lays at the feet of the conservative policies in the last eight years and back during the eighties that helped to cripple the agency.
The market only cares about how to stay profitable and like the article states, retailers pay for inspections for crops that have had problems beforehand, not potential problems in the future. Here's an example. Say squash had a 0.01 percent chance of becoming diseased and that disease would kill 40 percent of the people that ate it. Meanwhile, spinach has a twenty percent chance of becoming infected but only harming ten percent of those that ate it and wasn't fatal. Retailers will spend the money on the spinach inspection because of the higher chance for an outbreak and not on the squash because ultimately the market deals looks at risk in the same manner as insurance companies set rates for clients. It always comes back to the profit motive, not the human-safety motive.
Now government regulation backed up by a strong budget to enforce it doesn't just go after past problems, it looks for all problems. The government is in place for the people (theoretically) and must respond to their wishes. Collectively we want our food to be safe, not just particular problem spots here and there around the farm. That is why Congress shouldn't go off and create a new agency, they should stick to the one they've got and make it effective again.
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