Intensifying search for solutions to food safety problem
imports. Features include giving foreign countries and firms with good safety records expedited clearance through U.S. inspections, thereby allowing the FDA to “focus more on products that present the biggest risk”; and bolstering efforts within foreign countries to improve safety standards overseas.
* Federal superagency. The most frequently mentioned reform calls for bringing food inspections under one tent. Right now, the FDA and the USDA work in separate, often overlapping, fiefdoms when it comes to overseeing food safety. Complicating matters, the USDA receives 80 percent of the food safety budget to regulate 20 percent of the food supply, while the FDA receives 20 percent of the budget to oversee 80 percent of the nation’s food. The idea of such a superagency has many supporters, including Senator Carl Levin (D-Michigan), chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. “[Federal agencies] are stumbling over themselves,” Milano said. “There’s a huge opportunity for efficiencies to be gained by having one agency with one clear mandate.” Michael Doyle, a microbiologist who is director of the Center for Food Safety at the University of Georgia in Griffin, agreed. “There really needs to be a single food safety agency so that you don’t have all of this ridiculous overlap and duplication,” he said. “When you have it split up into different agencies like that, there’s a lot of bureaucratic infighting.”
Such a merger would also address the current imbalance in agency budgets and responsibilities. The FDA’s food inspection division — which most agree is woefully underfunded — is charged with inspecting all foods except for meat, poultry and eggs, which are covered by the better-funded USDA. The superagency concept has been implemented in other countries, but many observers doubt this will happen in the United States. “There appears to be no industry support, so that isn’t going to go anywhere,” said Michael Hansen, senior scientist with Consumers Union. “There has to be the will within the Congress to do this, and the executive branch has to be willing to tackle this,” Imperato said. “Unless they do, it’s just going to be business as usual, [and] that’s what I’ve seen so far.”
Asked about creating one oversight agency for food inspection, Michael Rogers, director of the FDA’s Office of Field Investigations, said a spirit of cooperation — not confusion — best describes the relationship between the two agencies. “I think that both agencies understand their
