The WAGE Managing Import Safety Collaborative examines market, regulatory, and hybrid approaches to managing risk from contamination of food commodities in the global supply chain.

Vicki Bier, Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering and Engineering Physics
Stephanie Tai, Assistant Professor of Law

Project Overview:

Recent incidents indicate that globally sourced products can create serious safety issues and present regulatory challenges. This collaborative will evaluate the relative capacity of national regulatory systems, international standards, and market forces to provide, individually or in various combinations, the necessary resources and incentives to address the problem of product safety through efficient testing, inspection, and quality control. A special emphasis will be placed on commodity foods, bulk chemicals, spices, and nutritional supplements, all of which are or can be part of the food chain and are especially susceptible to contamination –deliberate or otherwise.

The collaborative will move along two tracks giving special attention to imports into the U.S. and the European Union and to exports from China. With respect to market solutions, we will research how the structure of the supply chain affects the optimal design of corporate quality-assurance programs. In the process, we will identify cost-effective, risk-based strategies for inspection, auditing, and sampling of imported food.

With regard to regulation, we recognize that no single legal or governance strategy will be appropriate for dealing with all safety risks associated with imported commodities. Instead, the project will explore which incentives are best suited to dealing with any particular category of risk, then determine which regulatory mechanisms or governance structures could most effectively provide those incentives, and finally investigate how to implement those incentives and controls in a manner consistent with the wide variety of legal systems operating in the global market.