Collective investment in a common pool resource: Grower associations and food safety guidelines

Abstract

Common pool resources often face overexploitation, but collective action can counteract that tendency. We investigate collective investment in reputation for produce food safety, a common pool resource because of limited branding and traceability, by U.S. commodity organizations. We use a unique dataset constructed with data from U.S. Department of Agriculture, Food and Drug Administration, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and industry to provide novel evidence on collective investment in common pool resources. Notably, only large shocks to reputation such as foodborne disease outbreaks resulting in hospitalization increase the likelihood of food safety guideline adoption. Adoption of food safety guidelines by government‐backed organizations results in improvements in some food safety outcomes.

Impact of participation in collective action on farmers’ decisions and waiting time to adopt soil and water conservation measures

“…4.2.3 Generalized Propensity Score Match method for the impact of collective action on waiting time to adopt soil and water conservation measures. To avoid the impact of selection bias on the regression results, more and more scholars choose the counterfactual inference model to explore the correlation between variables (Koomson et al, 2023;Zhu and Yu, 2023). According to the research of Bia and Mattei (2008), Egger and Von Ehrlich (2013) Soil and water conservation measures Austin (2019), we choose GPSM to test the impact of collective action participation degree on the waiting time.…”

Collective reputation and food

“…Quality standards can also be a method to avoid food safety issues. Adalja et al (2022) give both a theoretical and empirical model and show that if a commodity faces a collective reputation, then food recalls induce producers to implement safety standards. Using a large data set containing many commodities, they find that organizations are more likely to adopt standards if they have a larger market share.…”

Food safety, reputation, and regulation

“…They estimate that FSMA implementation will increase costs to vegetable growers by 0.4%; to fruit and tree nut growers by 0.6%; and to berry growers by 1.0%. Adalja et al (2021) use detailed data on collective food-safety standards adopted by grower organizations and government-sponsored entities to study the factors that influenced the adoption of standards prior to the passage of FSMA. Their main findings are that organizations whose growers represented a large share of production were more likely to adopt food-safety standards, and that standards were more likely to be adopted by commodity groups in the wake of outbreaks associated with a given commodity that resulted in hospitalizations.…”

“…As it is, smaller growers—who were much less likely than larger growers to have adopted GAPs or similar voluntary standards for produce safety, pre‐FSMA—face little risk that outbreaks will be traced to their farms. Private and collective food‐safety practices were widely adopted before FSMA implementation, and some of them improved safety outcomes (Adalja et al, 2021). Moreover, practices are merely correlated with outcomes.…”