Research suggests that for optimal outcomes in the food system, public standards may need to be strengthened in conjunction with the implementation of robust private standards . Evidence from outside the food system suggests that non-governmental regulatory efforts achieve their best outcomes when the background public regulatory controls also strengthen over time; comparative research among US, Canadian and Australian paper mills revealed that adoption of environmentally friendly methods and technologies was greatest when both private and public standards regimes improved concurrently, raising the bar for all players and creating an overall climate of improved consciousness and responsibility . If private regulation instead substitutes for strengthening public approaches, or if too much responsibility is ultimately placed in the hands of non-governmental actors, broader societal benefits may fail to materialize. Finding the ideal balance between private and public regulation has become a pressing transatlantic concern in food regulation. In ideal terms, co-regulatory approaches and hybrid private and public regulatory regimes created by overlapping standards could be well poised to deliver desired public health outcomes in a complex and dynamic regulatory space, but many questions remain unanswered.
A profusion of overlapping public and private rules in co-regulatory models can lead to confusion, audit fatigue, curing cannabis and increased expenses for primary agricultural producers, with the end result that some regulatory goals may slide off the table as producers become overburdened with too many standards and rules . Research has suggested that the presence of overlapping standards controlling the same activities in often complementary but sometimes contradictory ways may constitute a separate and important shaping factor influencing the development of regulatory regimes equal to state regulation in its impact on producers . Efforts to harmonize public and private food safety requirements have begun within both national and international markets in an attempt to reduce the strain on producers but have so far been hampered by the parallel role that private food regulations play as tools of competitive advantage in food retail markets . Additional efforts at harmonization of private and public regulation are necessary to achieve regulatory goals without undue impact on producers , and to account for unintended consequences and regulatory priorities that have been underrepresented in food standards to date.As food safety risk management rose to prominence in the 1990s and early 2000s, regulation at both public and private levels sought to improve food safety controls on fresh products such as leafy greens. Private retailer safety standards proliferated, in hopes of reassuring consumers and solidifying low-risk production practices within an industrial production system with vertically integrated supply chains under strong corporate control.
But although pathogen presence is a prerequisite in foodborne illness transmission, the organization of the food production system may be ultimately responsible for whether and how pathogens pose a risk to consumers; in this sense, outbreaks may be best characterized as “food-system borne disease rather than food-borne disease” . Critics of the dominant food safety risk management framework point out that current private standards and policy solutions tend to address food safety risks without engaging with the larger economic and biological causes, essentially treating the symptoms without addressing the underlying disease: Field-level safety practices aim to control risk using technological methods such as sanitization of harvested products or modification of the growing environment to remove the natural. These steps do not address the role of large-scale centralized industrial agriculture in creating food safety risks .Compared to many other agricultural products destined for grocery markets, lettuces and other leafy greens are considered particularly high-risk food items. Leafy greens are at higher risk than many other crops in part because they grow so close to the ground, which increases the chances of exposure to pathogens via contact with soil, pest animals , agricultural chemical residues, runoff , and internal contamination by irrigation water . In addition, the cool, humid growing conditions that lettuce crops require for optimal growth are the very same conditions that favor pathogen persistence . With their large, flat surfaces and a high ratio of surface area to volume, leafy greens maximize the potential for pathogens to persist on their edible surfaces.
Leafy greens are also often harvested and processed by machines, and subject to additional processing steps such as cutting, rinsing and bagging , all of which can spread and magnify contamination during harvesting. Finally, crops such as lettuce are most commonly eaten raw rather than cooked, avoiding the kill-step which otherwise helps minimize or eliminate pathogen transmission from many other foods. This maximizes the chance that any pathogens present on fresh lettuces can survive to pose a health risk to the consumer. Despite the many challenges of growing and bringing to market such a sensitive and risk prone crop, production and consumption of leafy greens in both the United States and United Kingdom has risen since the 1970s due to the purchasing decisions of increasingly health conscious consumers . Increases in lettuce production and 8 consumption have come hand in hand with an increase in the risk of foodborne illness, as lettuce supply chains have lengthened, including more processing steps in order to provide steady year round supply to urban and peri-urban grocery retailers. Beginning in the United States in the 1980s and later expanding to other developed nations, leafy greens began to be sold in bagged, ready-to-serve salad mixes marketed as a convenience item aimed at busy grocery shoppers seeking healthy options that do not require additional preparation . These salad mixes are now one of the highest value fresh produce items in the US and UK grocery market , positioned as they are at the intersection of increased consumption of healthy foods, and convenience-oriented grocery purchasing . But bagged, pre-mixed salads may also present particularly high risks for consumers. More processing steps and longer supply chains increase the amount of time that pathogens can multiply between harvest and consumption. Bagged salads can be kept under refrigeration to travel farther and longer than whole heads of lettuce, while permitting pathogens to continue to incubate during transit and storage, especially where salad leaves are damaged . Evidence suggests that illnesses associated with leafy greens are more closely linked to consumption of ready-to-eat bagged salads, than to consumption of unprocessed lettuces that are sold by the head , making pathogen control especially important for packaged ready-to-eat leafy greens .Within the industrial fresh produce supply, efforts to control food safety risks have also revealed potential negative environmental impacts stemming from food safety attention. Attention—and potential changes—to multi-level food safety regulation in the US and UK leafy greens markets have typically followed outbreaks and public failures, of which there have been more incidents and higher profile difficulties in the US market. The 2006 outbreak of E. coli 0157:H7 from California spinach sickened more than 200 people and killed 3 . A lengthy investigation concluded that the contamination had originated in domestic cattle and feral pigs living adjacent to spinach fields in the central coast of California and may have entered fields through a combination of the movements of irrigation water, wind, and wild animals . This outbreak brought industry-wide attention to foodborne pathogens in US fresh leafy greens, creating lasting changes to the way lettuce production in the United States interacts with natural landscapes. To decrease food safety risks, farmers were instructed to minimize animal presence on and near agricultural operations by removing non-crop vegetation that may offer habitat for animal activities, how to dry cannabis and by employing wildlife traps, poisons, increased predation, and other deterrents. In California’s ecologically sensitive central coast growing region, these recommendations have created ongoing conflict between food safety goals and long-standing environmental efforts to improve water quality by promoting the maintenance of vegetated buffers and filter strips, and the use of conservation practices designed to allow agriculture to better coexist with local wildlife .
Framing the natural environment purely as a source of foodborne illness risk ignores indications that wetlands and non-crop vegetation at field margins provide an important filtering effect that contributes to pathogen reduction in cultivated fields , outweighing potential risks from increased wildlife penetration. In both the US and UK, food producers and retailers must today balance their differential responsibility to the environment and to the safety of consumers, but they are currently finding different ways forward. Evidence suggests that UK retailers have stronger accountability systems and may be better able to see and manage environmental challenges within their supply chains due to early and comprehensive action on supply chain sustainability, while US retailers have taken sustainability steps only in response to specific consumer pressures, and have typically tended to be aware of sustainability through the lens of corporate cost reduction rather than generalized environmental improvement . Retailers chart their course in this space via a complex system of socially-mediated decision making affected by norms of corporate behavior, the nature of the public regulatory framework in which corporations operate, the scientific and economic information they gather, and the marketing relationship they seek to cultivate with their customers. This multifaceted way of approaching decisions that must be made vis-à-vis environmental conduct in this high-risk food safety space constitutes each retailer’s “license to operate” which shapes responses to environmental and public health concerns. As primary producers, leafy greens farmers must navigate their way between the requirements imposed by food safety standards from retailers and government, and the capabilities and vulnerabilities of their productive lands. Farmers may be simultaneously bound by multiple private standards and government requirements, while also seeking to balance the needs of environmental stewardship.The 2011 Food Safety Modernization Act enacted by the United States is an example of “Command-and-control” regulation in the food system. The law lays out standards for acceptable procedures in controlling food safety risks, with specific allowed thresholds and permitted actions such as timing windows for the application of certain crop amendments prior to harvest. Assessments are slated to be carried out through state and federal inspection mechanisms including announced and unannounced audits of farm facilities and food processing facilities.9 Failures to comply with either established pathogen limits or codes of practice are met with fines and other punitive measures. Leafy greens handlers at all levels of the United States produce supply chain are required to follow HACCP guidelines, and maintenance of food safety is emphasized at field level. National food safety guidelines frame the natural growing environment of leafy greens crops primarily as a source of risk, recommending caution wherever agricultural lands abut natural areas, and prescribing a program of control and deterrence vis-a-vis wildlife. The United Kingdom’s due diligence framework also incorporates HACCP guidelines, and similarly treats food safety in fresh produce as a risk best managed at field-level. National audits and inspections within the UK agricultural system are carried out by local city and regional governments and their contractors, who in turn are overseen by the Food Standards Agency. Stakeholder experts at the level of the European Commission have identified bacterial pathogens as the top food safety risk, and field-level good agricultural practices as the most important way of controlling pathogens. However, produce safety alerts are seldom issued for bacterial pathogens, and tend to be employed much more readily for flagging excessive pesticide residues, indicating both a wider set of public health priorities and perhaps also a greater degree of importance placed by regulators on protecting retailer reputations from the negative consumer backlash of publicized outbreaks . The United Kingdom also uses a risk-based policy framework for food safety required by EU regulations, including the risk-based regulation strategy of requiring pre-regulatory assessments to prioritize food producers for public regulatory inspections. This represent a hybrid approach.Hybrid controls may develop as non-state mechanisms that are subsequently adopted by state regulatory authorities, or as the result of direct efforts to involve private actors in formation of cooperative regulatory mechanisms. Agricultural firms and local leafy greens growers in California responded to the 2006 food safety failure in spinach by developing the California Leafy Green Products Handler Marketing Agreement, LGMA, a private, voluntary field-level production standard for controlling food safety risks in leafy greens, with assistance from the United States FDA . The LGMA standard was created in 2007 as a way to get more rigorous safety standards in place for the next growing season after the 2006 outbreak rather than waiting for a longer public rule-making process . LGMA is overseen by a board of directors formed of leafy greens industry members, appointed and overseen by the California Department of Food and Agriculture.