E.C. Pasour Jr.

About the author: E.C. Pasour Jr. is an economist at North Carolina State University.

Private inspection firms driven by market incentives can provide consumers with more effective safeguards against tainted meat than federal inspection. A private firm inspecting meatpacking plants would be profitable only as long as its inspections accurately reflected the quality of the meat. If consumers became ill after eating meat inspected by a particular firm, that firm would soon go out of business. Thus, the profit incentive would stimulate more careful inspection of meat as well as the development of new methods to detect and destroy pathogens.

Last year's [1997] news reports of tainted beef focused public attention on the safety of the meat supply. In August 1997, Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman forced Hudson Foods to recall 25 million pounds...