alt Hacker NewsWhat’s your proposed alternative? If the FDA made the 500 page document instead, they aren’t providing day to day oversight.
By logic, a Driscoll or Taylor Farms set of rules needs to sit beyond the regulatory minimum (their lawyers would hate them putting a violation of the regulation in writing).
So, even if a farmer violates the contract, the existing regulation is either insufficient or was also violated.
For starters, I think it's reasonable to break these distributors up into multiple distributors.
One of the big issues with a company like Taylor Farms is that when something like cyclospora hits, we all discovered that the grocery store and restaurants really only had an illusion of choice. Nearly all the lettuce products were actually just Taylor farms. That means the only option for consumers to pressure the company is to stop eating lettuce all together. Healthy competition means these distributors will care a lot more about an outbreak like this because it'll drive people to their competitors rather than just being a blip in this quarter's budget. Markets only work when there's an actual market and not just a single player.
But further, yeah I do think the FDA needs a more active role in doing compliance checks. Ideally this isn't the job of the FDA and instead gets rolled into the USDA or a separate agency dedicated to food products. Having one big agency in charge of both food and drugs isn't great as drugs has ended up with all the actual investment.
Big companies are good at reducing cost, but one way they do that is by making liabilities someone else's problem. The bigger they get, the more they do that. It's a key reason why companies like Walmart are constantly being found to employ slave labor through their contractors. Walmart can rehire the very same contractors (but rebranded) after the controversy blows over and rinse/repeat.
The same dynamic exists with these mega-distributors.