A scenario described in game theory is called the prisoner’s dilemma. Briefly, the prisoner’s dilemma involves two prisoners (A and B) who are being held independently for questioning. In the exercise, the potential outcomes are described based on each prisoner’s responses during interrogation, the options being to remain silent or confess. The tricky part is that the sentence for each prisoner is not only tied to their individual responses to questions, but also to the answers provided by the other prisoner.
If the prisoners cooperate and do not provide any information, no one will be charged with the crime since there is no other evidence. However, if one prisoner blames the other, it significantly worsens the fate of the silent prisoner since they alone will be charged with the crime. If both implicate the other, there is a lesser sentence since the penalty is shared amongst the two. The logic of this scenario is that there are obvious motivations for each prisoner to act in their own self-interest. But the best collective outcomes always originate from cooperation. Prisoners’ dilemmas are commonly discussed outside of game theory and are found in many situations far removed from crimes.
The food safety prisoners
In food safety, we discuss the complexities of producing food in agricultural environments where many factors cannot be controlled by the grower. These can be weather, adjacent land, wildlife, etc., and recent produce outbreak investigations have repeatedly generated evidence connecting adjacent operations and animals (both domestic and wild) to growers’ risk. With this knowledge, growers are acting upon the findings, improving their understanding with more data collection, and are increasingly building their own scientific data showing the real impact that adjacent operations like animal operations have on their crops’ risk. Growers’ proactive efforts come with high costs – they must spend more to collect data, invest in research on potential mitigations, and increasingly find themselves with buffer distances that cause a significant loss of production acreage.
The mounting scientific data showing that contamination flows from animal and adjacent operations into produce fields is complicating the question of responsibility in the event of an outbreak. With this data, there are so many questions regarding land rights, regulatory authority, legal liabilities, and, ultimately, the ethical responsibilities for all parties. For the grower to protect their crops, they must invest in systems that better characterize their risk. This helps them fine-tune where resources need to go, how to manage potential contaminations, and when to manage them. In the process of better risk characterization, growers will also directly expose their neighbor’s contribution and liability to that risk, even if that operation may be unaware of their contribution to it. Conversely, if an adjacent animal operation is found to be a root cause in an outbreak, that operation has no say or knowledge on whether a grower did their part to minimize the risk to the crop. Is the contamination unavoidable from animal operations? Could they have done more to prevent it from leaving their site? Could the grower have managed the risk more appropriately on their side? Could either side sue the other for negligence contributing to the outbreak? Can the consumer sue both the grower and the adjacent and nearby animal operation? It’s most likely a ‘yes’ to all scenarios.
In a food safety event, the grower and adjacent animal operations have the most to lose when either party (or an external party) generates more evidence and blame against the other. With current technology for microbial testing, genetic analysis, and recent investigations implicating the root cause/origin of a pathogen, the balance of evidence can be built independent of the grower and animal operations’ knowledge or participation (samples can be collected from shared space, product, water). Does this data imbalance indicating the contamination’s origin as the animal operation benefit the grower? Not really – the grower is still legally and ethically responsible for ensuring that they do not produce adulterated food, regardless of where the pathogen came from. As with the classic prisoner’s dilemma, both entities in this scenario (and the consumers, too) serve the maximum penalty. No one wins.
In essence, those in the agricultural ecosystem stand at the crossroads of a real-world scenario of the prisoner’s dilemma, where each party’s rational self-interest for their business can increase their respective penalties and vulnerabilities and ultimately conflict with the collective goal to provide the safest food possible. While regulatory lines of oversight may end at the jurisdiction of the agency with assigned authority (FDA vs USDA vs EPA), the legal liability and potential lawsuits from all sides (grower, animal operator, consumers) do not.
Cooperation and collaboration between growers and adjacent land operations have the potential to provide optimum outcomes. Properly collected and utilized data originating from both sides (growers, animal operations) can become driving information for determining how to minimize pathogens leaving an animal operation, how to reduce contamination in produce fields, and offer insight on how to develop overall best mitigations and controls. This effort lowers the potential risk for everyone. By cooperating and unifying to protect each other, growers and adjacent operations can minimize their respective risk, optimize outcomes for all, establish evidence proving that negligence by either party is not occurring, and, importantly, optimize public health outcomes.
The agricultural ecosystem requires that we design mutual accountability frameworks. It’s not just that it is the right thing to do (our consumers deserve it) – it is necessary since a system built solely on self-interest is doomed to generate worse scenarios for all involved (growers, animal operations, consumers). The independent nature of science and testing will continue to accelerate the body of evidence on the origins of pathogens, and this evidence will lead to deleterious outcomes, lawsuits, and worst-case scenarios for all involved. But, with consistent and repeated activities built on cooperation and transparency, trust between these adjacent industries can compound into new ways to optimize each other’s fate and lead to measures that reduce the risk for everyone.