The federal government's reported figures for jobs "created or saved" by the "stimulus" bill (formally the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, or "ARRA") are now known to be wrong. The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, which oversees these figures, apparently has decided not to correct them.
A scandal has erupted over the federal government's reporting of the number of jobs created or saved by the "stimulus" bill (formally the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009).
This scandal would have been avoided if the government had complied with the Information Quality Act.
Washington Post staff writers Kimberly Kindy and Lyndsey Layton say the US Department of Agriculture's National Organics Program is falling short, allowing synthetic ingredients or to be used in making organic foods.
In their long Page One story, Kindy and Layton never reveal crucial facts about the National Organic Program: it's a marketing program, not a food safety program.
Regulation is widely understood as a tax on the activity or person being regulated. Where these activities repair genuine market failures, benefits from regulation may result. If there are benefits from, say, automobile safety regulation, one would expect the beneficiaries to be persons who otherwise would have been killed or injured at the pre-regulatory safety level.
But what about the costs of regulation? Who bears them? More...
An important element of Monday's post on E. coli and irradiation was the recognition that years of federal regulations had failed to significantly reduce foodborne illness risks. Conducting research for the post brought back memories of having reviewed the Food and Drug Administration's and Food Safety Inspection Service's initial regulations implementing the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) inspection regime.
Those reviews led to a presentation and a food safety conference, and the presentation led to a paper that was published as a chapter in a book on the economics of HACCP. (Amazon ranks the book #2,020,211, but hurry: as of Monday night they had one copy left.)
Last fall's E. coli O157:H7 outbreak in spinach has now been followed by an outbreak in lettuce used by certain fast food enterprises. Today's Wall Street Journal includes an editorial criticizing "E. Coli's Enablers," by which they mean activists who oppose irradiation.
Would irradiation of produce intended to be consumed raw have prevented these outbreaks?
Investigators have found the cattle ranch that appears to be the source
of the E. coli O157:H7 bug that infected a spinach farm a mile away But
they haven't figured out how the bug traveled the mile between the two
locations.
Industry and food safety experts alike are encouraging the public to
expect fresh produce to have zero microbial risks. Is that feasible?
USA Today reporters Elizabeth Weise and Julie Schmit say the E. coliO157:H7 bug responsible for the recent spinach outbreak has been positively matched to a farm in the Salinas Valley. Although the farm has not been identified, the story provides enough information to suggest that, at a minimum, federal Good Agricultural Practices are too vaguely defined to be useful. Making them mandatory, which Earthbound Farms implies government should have done to prevent the outbreak, is unlikely to help. More...
More problems for Earthbound Farms and its parent company Natural Selection Foods. Now its organic carrot juice has been identified as the culprit in an outbreak of botulism. More...
Sonya
Geis reports in today's Washington Post that there is an acute labor
shortage in California's Central Valley. There are not enough workers to harvest
and pack the tree fruits that are ready to go to market.
Growers and packers interviewed by Geis blame the shortage on a combination
of intensified immigration enforcement, competition for unskilled labor from
other industries such as construction, and the complexities of the federal government's
H-2A visa program. None apparently have considered the possibility of solving
the labor shortage by raising wages.
It is said that federal "Good Agricultural Practice" guidance ensures that fresh produce does not transmit pathogenic foodborne illness. Is this a reasonable inference? More...
In June, the ad hoc National Academy of Sciences committee empaneled to review OMB's proposed risk assessment guidance asked several affected federal agencies to provide comments.
Neutral Source has copies of these comments in our Library.
The Food and Drug Administration has identified
the source of most or all of the E. coli O157:H7 contamination that
has sickened dozens and caused at least one death: Natural Selection Foods,
otherwise known as Earthbound Farm, a California producer of organic fruits
and vegetables.
The Darwinian name of the company does not appear to have been intended as
ironic.
