Bill Marler of Marler Clark, which specializes in food-borne diseases, has been delivering a growing number of international presentations. It's a time of global food supply chains and weak links in those chains are getting businesses and national trading partners in trouble. Today, Marler was talking in London about this sprawling problem from a lawyer's perspective. [You can retrieve his PowerPoint Presentation embedded in his "Off to London" post on his blog.]
The two key issues the audience was interested in were:
- Why is there an increase in incidences of food-borne diseases
- What are the most effective approaches to prevent these from occurring.
Marler, ever the straight-shooter, answered: We don't know. First he gave a history of this problem in the U.S., as it dates back to the infamous 1992 Jack-in-the-Box E-Coli outbreak. Before that meat contamination epidemic ended in 1993, nearly 600 people, mostly children, were sickened in six states. There were four deaths. The cause was found to be knowingly under-cooking. As a result of the class-action, individual and shareholder lawsuits, a Congressional investigation, and big settlements, that problem got fixed until recently. Then all hell seemed to break loose again, not only in meat but also in produce.
Could this be happening because of:
- Industrialization of our food supply
- Technological advances in surveillance, and/or
- Bugs are bigger, stronger, faster?
Five major approaches have been advocated:
- Free market - as in the threat of losing market share and your contract with Wal-Mart
- Regulation - as in universal standards and strict enforcement
- Litigation - as in the threat of class-action, individual, and shareholder lawsuits, along with the bad publicity those bring. Here Marler recommends strict liability in civil litigation. The focus is on the product, not the conduct. That means there is liability without regard to fault, putting pressure on manufacturers that could correct the problem in the first place.
- Criminalization - as in sending the miscreants to prison, and not only demanding they pay fines. In food, just as in the securities industry, there would be the perp walk and shaming, along with the likely multi-year sentence. e.g. Bill Lerach.
- Morality - as in imposing global versions of the Golden Rule [This is the one taken least seriously].
Marler's other major international presentation had been in China. Businesses, both Chinese and non-Chinese, and government, Chinese and non-Chinese, wanted to know about the U.S. legal liability system.
For more information on this and other food-borne disease issues, readers can visit Marler's blog or google keywords.
Disclosure: On and off for two years I have doing digital editing for Marler Clark.
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