Former AIC researcher and UC Davis PhD graduate John Bovay and AIC director Dan Sumner has published implications of implementation of the US Food safety regulations. They highlight that important features of the rules had already been implemented by California producers and one implication is to cause other regions, including imports, to match the California standards.
Journal Article
Economic Effects of the U.S. Food Safety Modernization Act
John Bovay, Daniel A Sumner
Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy, Volume 40, Issue 3, 1 September
2018, Pages 402–420, https://doi.org/10.1093/aepp/
Abstract
The Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) substantially expands the authority of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to regulate fresh produce marketed in the United States. This article uses an equilibrium-displacement framework incorporating stochastic food-borne illness outbreaks to simulate long-run market effects of FSMA using the North American fresh-tomato industry as a case study. We demonstrate how, under FSMA, certain categories of suppliers will gain advantage over others. Growers and suppliers within the United States, and their buyers, are likely to gain relative to foreign producers and importers because FSMA imposes specific requirements for importers. Among fully regulated growers, large growers will benefit relative to small growers. Many producers have already adopted food-safety standards that closely resemble the FSMA rules, and the cost of implementing the FSMA requirements for these producers will be much lower than for other producers.