Posts Tagged ‘regulation’
California: America’s bread basket and food regulator
Baylen Linnekin has published a new law review article that you should read if you care about your right to eat whatever you want. He points out that California is leading the charge in regulating and banning politically incorrect foods, including hollandaise sauce and Caesar dressing, taco trucks and other street foods, eggs, raw milk, trans fats, and many others. This should worry the rest of us because as goes California, so goes the nation. For example, California was the first state to ban foie gras, and soon other jurisdictions followed suit, including famously Chicago.
Before reading Baylen’s article, I had no idea that California was responsible for so much of our food production. When you think of America’s bread basket, you tend to think of the midwest, but in fact it is California:
The sheer volume and variety of crops grown in California defy overstatement. The state leads the nation in production of almonds and walnuts and seemingly every crop alphabetically in between. In addition to almonds and walnuts, California is America‘s sole producer—meaning it is home to ninety-nine percent or more of the country‘s overall production—of figs, raisins, olives, clingstone peaches, persimmons, prunes, pomegranates, sweet rice, and clover seed. The state leads the nation in production of asparagus, avocados, bell peppers, broccoli, carrots, cauliflower, celery, cut flowers, dates, eggplant, garlic, grapes, herbs, kiwi, lemon, lettuce, lima beans, melons, nectarines, onions, pears, pistachios, plums, raspberries, strawberries, turnips, and more than a dozen other crops. All told, California farms account for nearly half of America‘s domestic production of fruits, nuts, and vegetables. California growers ship the vast majority of these crops to other U.S. states. California also accounts for all of America‘s nut exports, and three out of five fruit and vegetable exports.
California also has the most vibrant restaurant industry in the country. To me, this begs the question: If California’s agricultural and food industry is so massive why hasn’t it successfully organized to block food regulation? Is it simply the case that green lobby is much bigger?
Cass Sunstein and other people’s transparency
Cass Sunstein gave a talk at Brookings today about “the power of open government.” (Transcript here.) He stressed the key points of the administration’s Open Government Directive: transparency, collaboration, and participation. What I found interesting, though, is that all the examples he gave of open government were in fact examples of someone besides government being open.
He cited the new product recall database from the Consumer Product Safety Commission as a great example of open government. He also mentioned a tire safety ratings database from DoT, the toxic release inventory from EPA, nutrition labeling, FAA flight delay information, and OSHA workplace death tallies. I’m glad these data are public, but these are not about open government.
As Sunstein said, disclosure is a “high impact, low cost” form of regulation. It keeps actors accountable for their performance and this nudges them to behave well. But if disclosure works for regulated industries, it should work for government, too. To me that’s what open government is about–government disclosing its own performance, not just the performance of those it regulates.
Sunstein did mention the new OIRA dashboard, which is meant to give users a view to all of the Office’s open proceedings. (The site, however, was down during his talk–and still is as of this writing–because it is “experiencing technical difficulties.”) First, I haven’t seen any data in the new dashboard that wasn’t previously available at RegInfo.gov. Second, we need more than just disclosure of what matters are before OIRA now, we need information on performance, something Brookings’s Ted Gayer alluded to when he asked about the prospects of more retrospective review.
For example, Sunstein talked about the President’s SAVE Award program, which asks federal employees to submit ideas for budget savings. Thousands were collected and voted on and the winner was a VA employee who suggested that patients be allowed to take unused medicines home with them. Previously, unused portions of medicine were thrown away when the patient was discharged. Wonderful idea and a very laudable process of collaboration and participation to get at it.
My question is about transparency in performance: what happened to the administator(s) under whom drugs were systematically wasted? Were they fired or reprimanded? Did we at least have a management review of how such a policy came to be? Not to be punitive, but accountability must have consequences.
