An article in The Daily News (Galveston County, TX) provides yet another example of industry groups asking for federal regulation, realizing that safety is good for business. (Thanks to the Government Accountability Project blog for pointing this out.)

Domestic shrimpers — whose share of the American market has fallen to ten percent, according to the article — want new laws that will empower the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to inspect imported shrimp:

The industry is pressuring the federal government to revamp the way the U.S. Food and Drug Administration inspects shipments — only a tiny fraction are inspected, much less tested — and some in the industry want new laws requiring better disclosure of the origins of seafood.

If a foreign supplier refuses entry to American inspectors, the FDA has no legal authority to deny imports from that supplier, said Michael Taylor, a former FDA policy commissioner and professor of health policy at George Washington University….

The FDA has standards for imported seafood, but even if it did have legal authority to inspect every foreign supplier, government audits reveal the FDA is spread so thin that foreign firms can send potentially harmful seafood to the United States almost at will.

The story also underscores the problems with the bureaucratic morass that governs food safety in the United States. While FDA is responsible for regulating seafood, USDA regulates other kinds of meat like beef and poultry. Although USDA has been under fire recently, its track record on food safety is much better than that of the FDA.

Comparatively, USDA is better resourced and more properly authorized by Congress to conduct the kind of inspections necessary to ensure food safety. Before slaughter, USDA is legally required to inspect every head of cattle and every chicken for health and safety. USDA also inspects imported beef and poultry before it can be placed into commerce. While USDA needs more inspectors, its regulatory regime is intended to be exhaustive.

FDA, on the other hand, conducts risk-based inspections. Essentially, the agency makes educated guesses about where it can make the best use of its resources. FDA inspected just 1.2 percent of imported seafood, according to the article.

As a result, there is increasing concern about both domestic and foreign products under FDA's jurisdiction. In the past couple years, seafood, spinach, pet food, and peanut butter have all made headlines. In each instance, it has seemed that a better-resourced or better-functioning FDA could have reduced the chances of those products becoming contaminated.

Yesterday, after a period of long delay, the Department of the Interior announced it would list the polar bear as a "threatened" species under the Endangered Species Act. Designating a species as threatened is not as serious as calling it endangered, but it still affords the species federal protections and special considerations.

The debate over whether to list the polar bear has been a hot button issue, because the main threat to the species is global climate change which is affecting the ice cover and sea conditions the bear needs to subsist.

Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne said that the decision to list the polar bear under the Act does not permit the federal government to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. "Protecting the polar bear under the Endangered Species Act is a major step forward, but the Bush Administration has proposed using loopholes in the law to allow the greatest threat to the polar bear — global warming pollution — to continue unabated," said Andrew Wetzler, Director of the Endangered Species Project at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).

Although Kempthorne is passing the buck on climate change, that doesn't mean the decision is a hollow one. Climate change is not the only threat to the polar bear. Man's physical intrusion into polar bear habitats can add unnecessary peril to a sensitive situation; industrial activities can disrupt any species' lifestyle.

In fact, the reason the Interior Department delayed the decision to deem the polar bear as threatened was because it needed to hurriedly approve permits for oil and gas extraction in parts of Alaska where the polar bear lives. The department was legally required to make its decision in January but stalled while its division in charge of minerals extraction doled out permits to big polluters. Environmentalists sued, and a court ordered Interior to make the decision by May 15.

Because of the listing decision, future actions that benefit special interests at the polar bear's expense will not be so easy. According to NRDC, "Listing the polar bear guarantees federal agencies will be obligated to ensure that any action they authorize, fund, or carry out will not jeopardize the polar bears' continued existence or adversely modify their critical habitat, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will be required to prepare a recovery plan for the polar bear, specifying measures necessary for its protection." That's good news for the polar bear.