TrendGreater role for private industry in foreign food safety

The Port of Oakland, California, is the gateway to $2.72 billion a year in food imports into the United States. The Sacramento Bee’s Jim Downing reports that what with the anxiety about food safety following the 9/11 attacks, there are now cargo tracking systems in place which give customs agents a book’s worth of electronic data on most containers headed to the port. Profiling programs automatically flag likely trouble shipments for close inspection on U.S. soil.

Problem is, those information systems cannot detect an illegal chemical in a grain shipment or a hungry invasive insect hiding in fruit. That takes the trained eyes and scientific expertise of staff at two federal agencies: the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the agricultural quarantine inspection division of the customs agency. As the wave of imports climb — up nearly three-fold in the last decade in Northern California — critics are charging that the agencies have lost the capacity to do their job right.

Two recent examples are the doctored pet food ingredients from China, along with a variety of foreign insect invasions, most recently the Australian light brown apple moth. This insect threatens to do more than $100 million in damage to northern California fruit trees and grapevines, according to the state Department of Food and Agriculture.

After the 9/11 attacks, the number of FDA import inspectors nationwide jumped from 275 to 681, but has since fallen to 558, spokesman Michael Herndon said. Unlike Customs, the FDA has no staff on the grounds of the Port of Oakland. Its headquarters is tucked into a red-tiled office park near the Oakland Airport, across from the Oakland Raiders headquarters.

Lacking the capacity physically to investigate more than a fraction of all shipments, the FDA attempts to target its inspections at shipments likely to pose a health hazard or to be in violation of an import law. In 2006 the FDA was responsible for the oversight of 210,825 shipments through the Port of Oakland. FDA inspectors in 2006 conducted 5,061 field exams of food, labels and laboratory sample collections. This is an inspection-to-shipment ratio of about one to 42.

Caroline Smith DeWaal, food safety director for the Center for Science in the Public Interest, says a chronic shortage of staff to carry out an ever-expanding mission has bred a culture of futility at the FDA. “They just say ‘Well, we can’t possibly do the job.’ They’re really just throwing up their hands,” she said. DeWaal and others back bills now in Congress that would consolidate thousands of food officials from more than a dozen agencies into a new food safety agency. The bills would expand the scope of inspections.

Bob Gravani, a Cornell University food-science professor, said in an interview that the most powerful guarantor of food safety is not the government but rather the U.S. food industry. Industry, he said, has the resources and the business motive to ensure that foreign suppliers are supplying safe ingredients that won’t lead to costly recalls.