Food safetyObama proposes a single federal agency to monitor, enforce food safety standards

The U.S. food and agriculture sector, along with the government employees tasked with ensuring the safety of the foods Americans eat, are debating the White House’s new proposal for a single organization to oversee U.S. food safety inspections.

The New York Times explains that before a package of frozen pizza is sold, the meats on the pizza would have been examined by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), and the cheese and tomato sauce examined by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) — each agency relying on its own methods of inspection and testing. If a customer gets ill from eating the pizza, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) might notify the public, but it would be left to the FDA to pressure the pizza maker to issue a recall.

President Barack Obama’s proposal would place all food safety inspection responsibilities on the Food Safety Administration, an agency housed within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), to “provide focused, centralized leadership, a primary voice on food safety standards and compliance with those standards,” the administration wrote in its new budgetrequest. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) reports that at least fifteen agencies — from the Environmental Protection Agency to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — have some role in approving the foods Americans eat. Obama wants to untangle the web that forms when different agencies’ responsibilities overlap, but his proposal has already faced some opposition. “I’m afraid what we could see is what happened when the Department of Homeland Security was created, and they tried to fit a bunch of different agencies with different missions under one roof,” said Tony Corbo, a lobbyist for advocacy group Food and Water Watch.

Doug Powell, a former professor of food safety at Kansas State University and the publisher of barfblog.com, believes Obama’s proposal might ultimately provide less food protection. “The research doesn’t support the idea that a single agency would protect food safety any more than the system U.S. currently has in place,” Powell said. “Look at the United Kingdom and the horse-meat scandal or Canada, which had a massive beef recall a few years ago. Both of those countries have single food safety agencies, and it didn’t stop contaminated products from reaching the public.”

Supporters of Obama’s proposal insist that America’s food safety system needs an overhaul. According to the CDC, roughly eighty-seven million Americans are sickened each year by food contamination, 371,000 are hospitalized with food-related illness, and 5,700 die from food-related disease. The GAO addsthat the country’s food safety system is “high-risk” because of “inconsistent oversight, ineffective coordination, and inefficient use of resources.”

Senator Richard J. Durbin (D-Illinois) and Representative Rosa DeLauro (D-Connecticut) have both introduced bills to create a single food agency, but unlike the White House’s proposal, their bills would create a stand-alone agency that would not be housed at HHS. “A single food safety agency would ensure one person is held accountable for food safety, research, prevention, inspections, investigations and labeling,” said DeLauro. “There would be no more confusion around overlapping jurisdictions.”

Currently, the FDA has oversight for roughly 80 percent of the foods Americans eat, including seafood, vegetables, fruit, dairy products, and shelled eggs. The USDA oversees meat, poultry, and processed eggs. Both agencies perform their inspection duties differently. USDA inspectors must be present during all meat and poultry plants food operations. In contrast, because of the large volume and wide range of food they must inspect, FDA inspectors visit plants less frequently, often only when a problem has been cited. Some USDA food safety inspectors see the FDA’s inspection process as less rigorous than theirs, worrying that consolidating inspection functions would weaken USDA standards. “This would drag us down to their minuscule standards,” said Stan Painter, a USDA food safety inspector in Alabama, who is president of the inspectors’ union. “They don’t do inspections. They run in for a visit.”

Dr. David Acheson, a consultant for food and beverage companies, who has worked on food safety at the USDA and the FDA, said consolidating the two inspection systems could be done effectively. “It’s the way we need to go,” he said. “We are burning through dollars where we have F.D.A. and Agriculture Department in the same plants doing different things.”