In the two years since COVID first arrived in the US, Americans have had to get used to things being out of stock. Refrigerators, 
stoves, washers—at various points, global supply-chain issues have meant that each of these has been tough to come by. But
 while those stock-outs may have been annoying, Americans today are dealing with a shortage that’s actually serious: a dearth
 of infant formula. In the first week of May, the national out-of-stock rate for infant formula was 43%, and there’s no sign that things
 have improved since. And this supply-chain problem is different from those earlier ones in two ways. First, formula is not a
 product you can afford to wait for. (Babies need to be fed!) Second, this problem is largely self-inflicted.
The proximate cause of the shortage was the shutdown of Abbott Laboratories’s formula factory in Sturgis, Michigan, and the
company’s voluntary recall of powder-formula products made there, after FDA inspectors found a bacteria called Cronobacter 
inside the plant. (Months earlier, four infants who consumed formula from the factory had become ill with Cronobacter infections, 
and two had died, though Abbott says that the illnesses were not caused by consuming its products.) But the reason that shutdown
was so consequential is that we’ve created a system in which almost all the formula consumed in the US is made by a small 
number of companies in a small number of factories; taking just one of them offline has massive ripple effects across the economy.
Parents in Canada and Europe aren’t having any trouble finding baby formula. It’s only American parents who have been left 
scrambling.
The numbers behind the crisis are pretty straightforward. Three companies—Abbott, Mead, and Nestle—account for the vast
 majority of formula sold in the US, and Abbott alone has more than 40% of the market—and 98% of the formula sold in the US
 is made in the US In other words, there is essentially no foreign competition. While countries like Germany and Switzerland have 
robust infant-formula industries, their companies sell almost nothing here directly.
That’s not because of a lack of demand for or interest in European baby formula; on the contrary, you can read myriad stories
 online about American parents going to great lengths to import formula made by companies like HiPP and Holle. Instead, there 
are no almost-legal imports from Europe because we have a tariff and regulatory system effectively designed to keep them out.
That system starts with tariffs. Imported baby formula is subject to a tariff that’s typically 17.5%. On top of that, there’s an abstruse
 tariff-rate quota system, which means that once a certain amount of formula is imported from a country, it gets slapped with an 
extra tariff in addition to the original one. So any foreign-formula manufacturer who wants to sell its products in the US is going to
 be at a serious cost disadvantage to the Abbotts of the world.
To even get to that point, though, foreign-formula manufacturers have to satisfy not only the FDA’s nutritional requirements but
 also the agency’s surprisingly detailed labeling requirements. The FDA doesn’t officially approve infant formulas (the way it 
approves, say, drugs). But any product that doesn’t meet its rules—which include things like how ingredients should be listed 
on the label—can’t be sold in the US.
None of this is because European infant formula doesn’t meet US standards: A 2019 study of 13 brands found that all of them 
met 15 out of 16 nutritional requirements. Indeed, the EU has its own nutritional requirements, which have actually been updated
 more frequently than those in the US.
The key here is that all these restrictions fit together to keep foreign producers out of the market. The economic incentives to go
 to all that trouble and expense are small because the tariffs and tariff-rate quotas limit their potential sales and profits. So they’ve
 understandably chosen not to enter the US market, leaving it to the big domestic players.
It should be said that the motivation behind the FDA requirements is understandable. But in practical terms, the concern with 
safety has become a recipe for protecting the current oligopoly of formula manufacturers in the US And this is not a problem only 
in the infant-formula market. You can see a similar phenomenon at work in the generic-drug market, where FDA rules often mean
 that US consumers have only one choice of drug—and have to pay through the nose for it—even when there are multiple 
versions of the drug being made in Europe.In a broader sense, what the infant-formula crisis speaks to is the fact that setting 
up barriers that make it harder for Americans to buy stuff from the rest of the world—which is something Donald Trump did a 
lot of, and that Joe Biden has done little to roll back—makes the US economy more vulnerable, not less, to supply shocks. 
Free trade has become oddly unpopular in Washington, D.C. over the past six years. But the infant-formula market could use 
a lot more of it.

来源：Fast Company