Achieving A Safe Food Supply in Increasingly Global Markets
Achieving A Safe Food Supply in Increasingly Global Markets
RFF First Wednesday Seminar
June 7, 2006
A growing proportion of fresh foods consumed in the United States are produced in other countries. This trend raises several questions related to food safety. Is the United States importing other countries' environmental systems via fresh food imports? What are consumer risks from imported foods? What are current government and industry approaches to maintaining the safety of food imports? What are practices in Europe? How might improving the safety of food imports be coupled with broader goals, such as improving sanitation in developing countries? Our panelists will discuss these and other issues associated with a safe food supply.
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| Introduction Phil Sharp, RFF President |
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Moderator: Sandra Hoffmann Hoffmann's research focuses on the role of economics in regulatory risk analysis, including health evaluation, regulatory design, and development of decision-analysis models to aid regulatory decisionmaking. She works on policy issues such as food safety, valuation of children's benefits from environmental policy, and assessing the social costs of pesticide use. Hoffmann is co-editor of Toward Safer Food: Perspectives on Risk and Priority Setting (RFF Press, 2005), which draws together leading food safety and health economics researchers to identify the institutional and scientific components needed in a comprehensive approach to risk-based decisionmaking in the U.S. food safety regulatory system. She currently is working with others to develop comparative risk-ranking models of the U.S. food system. She holds a Ph.D. in agricultural and resource economics from the University of California-Berkeley and a J.D from the University of Michigan.
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Elise Golan Golan received her Ph.D. in agricultural economics from the University of California at Berkeley and completed a post-doctorate fellowship focusing on environmental economics at the University of Haifa, Israel. Before joining ERS, Golan did consulting work for, among others, the World Bank, the International Labour Organization, and the California Department of Finance. She served as a senior staff economist on the President's Council of Economic Advisers from 1998-99. At ERS, Golan's work has focused on the distributional consequences of food policy, the economics of food labeling and traceability, and domestic and international food safety policy. |
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David Orden Orden is engaged in active research and public-policy education programs on the economics and political economy of domestic support policies, international trade negotiations, and technical barriers to trade. He has been a visiting fellow at the University of New South Wales in Australia, chairman of the International Agricultural Trade Research Consortium, and visiting professor at StanfordUniversity. He is coauthor of Policy Reform in American Agriculture: Analysis and Prognosis, which received the American Agricultural Economics Association Quality of Communication Award in 2000, and Food Regulation and Trade: Toward a Safe and Open Global System. Orden holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Minnesota .
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Bob Rust Rust has been involved in all aspects of the sprouted-seed industry since 1979. He is a commercial sprout producer and was a founding member of the International Sprout Growers Association, and remains active on its research committee, technical review board, board of directors, and executive committee. ISS is one of the two largest sprouting seed suppliers in North America, and manufactures commercial sprout equipment and supplies sprout growers throughout the world with seed, packaging, and equipment. It developed a program of seed screening that has allowed it to avoid all sprout-related outbreaks or recalls in North America since 2000, causing health organizations worldwide to start recommending ISS screening procedures be used on any seed destined for sprouting.
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Ziolkowski joined FAO in February 2006, following more than 22 years with the U.S. government. He was a staff member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations; national security adviser to then-Republican Leader Senator Bob Dole, staff member of the House Agriculture Appropriations Subcommittee, and most recently as clerk of the Senate Agriculture Appropriations Subcommittee. He served twice as staff member of the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry and as the Committee’s staff director. He also served in the Peace Corps and as a foreign service officer in the Department of State. His private-sector experience includes two years with the Mobil Oil Corporation in New York. Ziolkowski has a Bachelor’s degree in journalism from Bowling Green State University.
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Participants
Sandra Hoffmann
