Challenges in choosing the mix of public and private standards for food quality assurance

Abstract

Several federal agencies have mandates to regulate and/or oversee and support the provision of agricultural and food quality in the USA. Federal policy and regulatory choices determine the resulting mix of public and private responsibility for quality assurance. This chapter presents a framework for analyzing and evaluating federal programs based on the quality attributes they target, their policy rationales, and the policy instruments (mandatory and voluntary) they use, including types of labeling. This framework is applied to survey the quality assurance programs of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture in the areas of food safety, nutrition, sensory/organoleptic, value/function, and process attributes. The federal government faces several challenges in adjusting its policies and regulations in order to develop a more effective mix of activities targeted at agricultural and food quality assurance. These challenges include scrutinizing rationales for marketing policies across agricultural and food quality attributes and evaluating the mix of mandatory regulatory versus voluntary market oversight/support approaches used.