This is the Kato Daily Podcast for Friday, May 13th, 2022.

I'm Caleb Brown.

There are bare shelves where there should be baby formula,

and you may be able to guess that what keeps those shelves bear in our turbulent economic times, trade and

other regulatory rules that make it harder for the private sector to nimbly tweak supplies

and get product to market.

For parents who depend on baby formula, the stakes could not be higher.

Cato's Gabriella Beaumont Smith explains.

If you could describe it in just a couple of words, what was the precipitating event that suddenly

made all of us care so much about access to baby formula.

Well, there, as with many things, there is no one event that causes these crises, but the reason why it has become so concerning as of the last few weeks is there have been significant

recalls over the last few months that have left inventories in stores like Walgreens,

CVS and Target at very low levels so that those stores are either completely empty or have started promoting

or started putting out limitations on the number of formula products that people can buy at one time,

which is obviously concerning to many parents. I can imagine walking into a store and seeing a big sign that says please

don't buy any more than two cans of formula can put them in a bit of a tizzy.

And we should note at least in terms of the the realities for parents

mothers who have chosen to use formula for whatever reason or have to use formula for

whatever reason in many cases it

doesn't take very long for them to lose the ability to just well I'll just

breastfeed now and that that in many cases becomes an impossibility.

Exactly and so that's really what this story is about. It's about what are the

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