GAPs Can Pay Off - February 2007

Growers who don't put up food contamination "firewalls" are endangering not only the health of consumers, but of their bottom lines.

By David Eddy
Senior Western Editor

GROWERS wrestling with food safety issues face one big problem right off the bat: It’s impossible. Despite all the careful measures you may take, the fact of the matter is if you raise a crop outside of a greenhouse environment, there’s no way you’ll be able to achieve an absolute level of certainty that your crop won’t be contaminated. Even if you were to string impregnable fences around all your fields, which in itself is obviously not financially feasible, you still couldn’t prevent birds from flying overhead. As Trevor Suslow, a University of California-Davis postharvest specialist put it at a recent ag food safety forum: “Perfect safety is not an attainable goal.”

But it’s not as if growers should just throw in the towel, said Suslow. Elimination is not effective, so for growers, prevention is the goal. Even then, perfection is not attainable, but Suslow says that the more steps a grower takes to preventing a problem, the better off he’ll be in the long run. Borrowing a word from the computer world, Suslow says growers need to put up as many “firewalls” as they can.

But how many firewalls are reasonable? Most of a grower’s costs correlate at least somewhat with revenues, and can reasonably be estimated. If you invest so much more in fertilizers, for example, you can generally approximate how much more yield you will realize. Mechanizing a field task may cost a large initial outlay, but at least you know you will make some of that back, and hopefully a little more, in labor savings. However, as the authors of a USDA-Economic Research Service (ERS) report on the topic note, produce grown with more food safety practices does not receive higher prices; growers generally only embark on a program to maintain markets. “Incentives for growers to adopt additional food safety practices are somewhat weak,” was what agricultural economists Linda Calvin, Belem Avendano, and Rita Schwentesius found when they embarked on the report: “The Economics of Food Safety: The Case of Green Onions and Hepatitis A Outbreaks.”

Millennium’s First Big Scare
In the fall of 2003, large-scale hepatitis outbreaks rocked the U.S., just as the outbreak of E. coli on spinach did three years later. The hepatitis outbreak, in some ways, was worse. Four people were killed and at least 550 more were sickened from consuming green onions at a chain of Mexican restaurants. The outbreak was traced to green onions grown in Mexico. For the ERS study, the economists decided to take a closer look, interviewing many of the 26 growers who produced green onions at that time at the source of the tainted green onions, the Mexicali Valley. What they found was eye-opening, and instructive for growers today.

First, while only four growers were found to have shipped tainted product, all the producers suffered, some who weren’t even in the region when the onions in question were grown. “The output of the four firms named by the FDA as being the source of the contaminated produce represented a relatively small share of the area’s summer production of green onions and an even smaller share of total winter and summer production,” the report concluded. “But the problems of these firms affected the whole industry.”

It’s In Your Hands
But some good news did come from the study, or at least it’s good for conscientious growers. How much a food safety outbreak hurts you is, at least to a degree, partly up to you. Obviously, if your name is implicated in connection with a food safety problem, you will have a crisis on your hands. However, as FDA gains experience in this arena, hopefully growers who are not at fault will not be implicated.

Assuming you have not been named and you have instituted Good Agricultural Practices (GAPs), you have at least a fighting chance of saving your bottom line. In the study, those growers who had instituted GAPs didn’t even see much disruption in their green onion sales, and not at all in other crops. (See “GAPs Are Critical”) The growers who hadn’t implemented GAPs saw their volume of green onions sales drop by half, and up to nearly a third for other crops.

So the good news is that when it comes to food safety, your fate is, at least in part, in your hands. But be advised when it comes to GAPs, the situation might be akin to that old auto parts ad: “Pay now, or pay later.” At least that was the outcome in Mexico. “All green onion growers who did not already comply with GAPs, not just the four growers named by the FDA, had to undertake investments because of new buyer demands for food safety assurances,” the authors concluded. “Growers wanted some group action to ensure that a few noncompliant growers could not hurt their businesses and reputations again in the future.”

E-mail questions or comments about this article to deddy@meistermedia.com