Demand Enhancement through Food-Safety Regulation: Benefit-Cost Analysis of Collective Action in the California Pistachio Industry

Julian Alston, Henrich Brunke, Richard Gray and Daniel Sumner

No 25461, 2006 Annual Meeting, August 12-18, 2006, Queensland, Australia from International Association of Agricultural Economists

Abstract: Food safety shocks can threaten the health of consumers, create havoc within an industry and result in severe losses to producers. Governments often attempt to enhance food safety by mandating standards and inspection of food products to supplement the voluntary efforts by private firms. This paper assesses a form of collective action that falls between typical government mandates and purely private action. The California pistachio industry recently established a U.S. federal marketing order. This order sets quality standards and requires inspection and certification, aiming to reduce the likelihood of dangerous or poor quality pistachios being sold to consumers and to provide some quality assurance to consumers. Simulation results indicate that, across the full range of parameters used in the analysis, the benefit-cost analysis was always favorable to the new policy. Continuing work is extending the analysis to account for some particular features of the pistachio industry, to consider alternative policies, and to draw inferences for the application of similar policies to other California specialty crops.

Keywords: Food; Consumption/Nutrition/Food; Safety (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 17
Date: 2006
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/25461/files/pp060746.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:iaae06:25461

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.25461

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2006 Annual Meeting, August 12-18, 2006, Queensland, Australia from International Association of Agricultural Economists Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().