Mr. President, we urge you to adopt broad and consistent use of product performance standards as the centerpiece of foodborne pathogen regulation.

Performance standards help assure product safety, maintain consumer confidence, and provide economic incentives for industry to find more efficient means of meeting food safety goals. This action would build on and strengthen already accepted principles of food safety regulation. In some instances, it will require legislative change; in other cases, sufficient legal authority already exists.

Download this Policy Recommendation

Our recommendation draws on and is in large part in agreement with recent recommendations from the 2003 National Academy of Sciences Committee on Review of the Use of Scientific Criteria and Performance Standards for Safe Food.* Establishing performance standards is one element of the overall structural reform recommended in Chapter 16. Even if the full menu of reforms suggested there cannot be implemented, it should be possible to implement clear performance standards.

* NAS (National Academy of Sciences). 2003. Scientific Criteria to Ensure Safe Food.Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.

Related Policy Recommendation:

Chapter 16. Modernizing the Food Safety System 
Michael R. Taylor

Sandra A. Hoffman examines the use of regulation and tort law in managing health and environmental risks, currently focusing on food safety, valuation of children's benefits from environmental protection, and tort compensation for nonmonetary loss. She is a coeditor of Toward Safer Food: Perspectives on Risk and Priority Setting.

Alan J. Krupnick analyzes the benefits, costs, and design of air pollution policies and also focuses on valuation of health and ecological improvements. He is former senior economist at the Council of Economic Advisers. He is the author of Valuing Health Outcomes: Policy Choices and Technical Issues.
Chapter 12. Focus on Particulates More Than Smog
Chapter 13. A New Approach to Air Quality Management 

All Policy Recommendations in New Approaches on Energy and the Environment are available for complimentary download from each chapter's webpage. (Copyright © 2004 by Resources for the Future.) Use of these chapters is for personal use only. Contents may not be duplicated or retransmitted by print, electronic, or other means without written permission of the publisher. To purchase a printed copy of the book, click on the button below.