Newswise — Securing the borders is one way of insuring the safety of food imported from other nations, but border management among trading nations also means finding ways to push the border back.
"The border is important as a physical space, but the best way to secure the border is to focus on countries' regulatory systems and harmonize them," explained Justin Kastner, assistant professor of food safety and security at Kansas State University. Kastner's research has found that targeting specific geographical regions within nations is one way of streamlining trade between nations where food safety issues might otherwise cause problems.
Kastner, who has explored the issue for the Food Safety Consortium and has collaborated with Jason Ackleson, an associate professor of government at New Mexico State University, noted that food safety and food security regulators will continue to monitor what crosses the border. But the U.S. border strategy will go beyond that.
In North America, the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) Agreement among the United States, Canada and Mexico serves as a mechanism to encourage the three countries to harmonize their systems as much as possible so problems at the border are reduced. An example of that approach is in the Mexican state of Chihuahua, which also shows how regionalization of trade issues affects food safety. Chihuahua exports about a million cattle a year to the United States. With such a large import of animals comes health and food security concerns for the United States. "Some of these are animal diseases such as bovine tuberculosis," Kastner said. "We are concerned about how can we ensure that cattle imported from that region are healthy. The state of Chihuahua is economically invested in trading with us, and they have an economic interest in maintaining high levels of animal health." The result is that the United States will follow a targeted policy when deciding what to import from Mexico. "For example, we will import with regards to certain animals and certain diseases from particular sub-national regions in Mexico, but not other regions in Mexico," Kastner said. "That's a principle called regionalization, a concept we believe works for large countries. In the SPP agreement, the spirit is to allow such concepts as regionalization to be implemented." Kastner noted that as the United States begins a new presidential administration, some scholars speculate that the SPP's spirit will continue, but re-emerge in a different policy form. Using regionalization, the United States has some leverage that gives Chihuahua some incentive to make sure its cattle meet U.S. standards. "Were it not for the economic stakes, it is doubtful that this state in northern Mexico would put forth the regulatory effort to ensure, for example, that animals from certain areas are not transported and offloaded into other areas," Kastner said. Geographic proximity itself is enough incentive to encourage U.S.-Mexico trade. Some previous global trade negotiations have failed, which has led to a greater emphasis on encouraging regional economic growth. "So for us as a country to be competitive we need to be regionally competitive, which means we need to be more efficient on a regional basis, which means we need to be integrated with Canada and Mexico," Kastner said. "We're much more harmonized with Canada than with Mexico. But by using such concepts as regionalization, we can concentrate on a region of Mexico." Regionalization also works to ensure food safety efforts are followed within other nations. The Guangdong region of China exports food to Hong Kong, where the private importers insist on higher levels of safety and quality than the government would ordinarily enforce. Private supply chain audits and standards are raising the quality of food that Hong Kong receives. It's a lesson the United States can follow. "That shows that even in China there are private interests working to raise food safety levels, but it remains to be seen if that's going to help clean up China's food safety problems," Kastner said. "We in the United States import from China, so we need to figure out how can we get some of those private economic incentives to work in our favor. We are now placing U.S. Food and Drug Administration inspectors in the Chinese regulatory infrastructure." Kastner said China is not likely to develop a robust and error-proof food safety system at the national level, and the demands of Hong Kong's private supply chains won't likely rid Guangdong of all its food safety problems. But the private audits and market forces can still raise standards in key regions.
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