Regulating Farming: Balancing Food Safety and Environmental Protection in A Cooperative Governance Regime

After providing a brief overview of regulation in each area, Part I of this Article identifies three types of discordance between produce safety and environmental protection on farms. First, because of limited resources, farmers will have to choose between implementing food safety practices and implementing environmental practices. Second, indirect trade-offs between the two regulatory goals result in damaging collateral consequences for the environment. Food safety regulation may exacerbate a range of existing environmental harms. Third, there is at least one direct clash that may make compliance with food safety law incompatible with participation in certain environmental programs. Part I also addresses the possibility that some environmental protection practices may also improve food safety. Part II considers when and by whom these trade-offs are evaluated during the regulatory process. It argues that existing trade-off management tools fall short for agricultural regulation because they fail to take into consideration the structure of cooperative governance, which delays many of the regulatory decisions until after rulemaking is over. Part III offers a typology of trade-off management tools. It categorizes these solutions based on when in the regulatory process each of these tools is used. Part III then proposes a solution aimed at reducing the Food Safety Act\u27s collateral environmental consequences. It calls on the FDA to require farmers to conduct written evaluations of trade-offs between food safety and environmental protection