SAN FRANCISCO — Contaminated Chinese wheat gluten, recently identified in America’s pet food, has spurred calls in Congress for increased food-safety regulations. Yet the Senate already is considering a mandatory country-of-origin labeling law, which will add costs but won’t increase safety.

Some think our safety depends on labeling laws that reveal which countries grow every ingredient in food that shows up on supermarket shelves or restaurant menus, but this is untrue. Country-of-origin labeling confuses protection with protectionism.

The Food and Drug Administration regulates $417 billion in domestic foods and $49 billion in imports. There have been health incidents with both kinds. The mad-cow disease outbreak in 2003 and the spinach E. coli outbreak last year are examples of foreign and home-grown food safety failures.

The new labeling proposal intends to expedite retail labeling of beef, lamb, pork, fish, peanuts, and fresh and frozen fruits and vegetables. Two exceptions are processed foods that have been “transformed” or processed upon entering the United States because it is difficult to separate their ingredients, and restaurants and cafeterias for which labeling food would be extremely costly.

Supporters of mandatory labeling invoke disease outbreaks or even terrorist attacks, sparking calls for big-government action. Unfortunately, labeling doesn’t actually help food-safety agencies to locate the source of contamination, according to the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Investigating such outbreaks is a complicated and timely effort, with or without labels. If a dangerous product makes it to the shelf, the FDA has already failed.

Agri-marketing is an innovative business where suppliers change frequently. The Food Marketing Institute estimates that both suppliers and retailers would routinely have to update their labels when the labeling proposal goes into effect. This requires labor, paperwork and higher prices for consumers.

FMI found that when a retailer tested country-of-origin labeling with fruit salad, packages had to be hand-labeled since fruit comes from varying locations. The cost for each store was more than $150,000 a year, averaging $4.8 billion per year for 31,000 retailers.

Labels showing that a cow that was “Born in Mexico, raised in Canada and slaughtered in the U.S.” tell the consumer nothing about food safety. Neither is there sufficient evidence that labels determine our decisions to purchase food. If they did, then consumers would pay extra for grocers to provide them.

More serious is the possibility that imported food is shifted into restaurants, which then become subject to the labeling law. Restaurants would certainly go out of business trying to label their menus.

Furthermore, it’s not fair for the U.S. government to penalize all Chinese food companies by requiring labels. Different Chinese food companies compete with one another. If one U.S. software firm sold a product in China that caused computers to crash, it would not help Chinese computer users if their government mandated country-of-origin labels for all U.S. software.

What counts is safety inspection, not labels. Companies have taken it upon themselves to guarantee quality because the government has proved unreliable.

Other recent ideas include $13 million for FDA food safety, and the Safe Food Act, which would combine 15 food regulating agencies into one large bureaucracy, supposedly to improve the effectiveness of government inspections.

When unburdened by government restrictions, food companies will devise their own methods of ensuring safe products in response to consumer demand, not Capitol Hill. Free-market methods will prove less costly and more effective than protectionist government mandates.

Diana M. Ernst is a public policy fellow at the Pacific Research Institute, pacificresearch.org.

* This article printed with the title "Labeling won't spur safe consumption."
** This article printed with the title "Market will force safety."
***This article printed with the title "Labeling food by country of origin will do little to spur safe-consumption."