Wednesday, April 13, 2022
Lia Nogueira, Kathy Baylis, Linlin Fan, Kathryn Pace
The safety of food imports continues to be in the spotlight. Globally, each year, contaminated food causes almost 1 in 10 people to fall ill and 420 thousand people to die (WHO, 2017). Protecting consumers from unsafe foods is complicated by the increased role of international trade in our food system. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that disease outbreaks associated with imported food increased from 1996 to 2014, with fish and produce being the main culprits (Gould et al., 2017). For example, in 2019, two separate cases of tuna from Vietnam were found to have sickened over 60 people in the United States (FDA, 2020), and two years before, over 40 people were sickened by an outbreak of histamine poisoning in France caused by tuna imported from Reunion Island (Velut et al., 2019). Although increased scrutiny at the border has the laudable goal of protecting health, food import rejections may be subject to pressure for import protection. Given that border inspections are limited, if food inspections are directed to products that threaten the domestic industry, they may not be optimally targeting products that threaten domestic health. In the article titled “Something Fishy in Seafood Trade? the Relation between Tariff and non-Tariff Barriers” recently published in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, we ask whether the application of food import rules has been influenced by demand for protection.
Co-authors:
Kathy Baylis, Department of Geography, University of California Santa Barbara
Linlin Fan, Department of Agricultural Economics, Sociology and Education, Pennsylvania State University
Kathryn Pace, School of Social Work, Columbia University
Originally published in Cornhusker Economics by the Department of Agricultural Economics, University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Lia Nogueira
Lia Nogueira is a faculty fellow with the Yeutter Institute and an agricultural economics professor in the College of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. View biography.
Opinions expressed are solely those of the author and not the Yeutter Institute or the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.