Intensifying search for solutions to food safety problem

to the United States from other countries. Short of creating one federal superagency, another obvious solution: Give the FDA, especially, more cash to boost the number of inspectors and inspections of imported goods. This sounds simple, but in testimony delivered at a congressional hearing recently on the issue of food safety, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services secretary Mike Leavitt went on record as saying that, “We cannot inspect our way to safety.” He said: “The federal government cannot, and it should not, attempt to physically inspect every product that enters the United States. Doing so would bring the international trade of this country to a standstill.” Still, the agency’s critics say the FDA would only gain from more funding and from broader powers to monitor foods from abroad.

The third, and least radical, alternative for improving oversight of imported foods: Give the agency recall authority. The FDA routinely recalls bad drugs from the market, but it has no such jurisdiction over bad food — with the exception of infant formula. “Now, if you’re some little firm in China, and you know that there is no mandatory [FDA] recall authority, odds are you aren’t going to get caught, so you can dump your less standard products in the U.S. with little recourse to who’s going to track them down or enforce it,” Milano said.

All three recommendations — creation of a food-supervision superagency; giving the FDA manadatory food recall authority; and tightening supervision of imported food — as well as others, such as country-of-origin labeling and instituting so-called equivalency standards which would demand that imported foods be as safe as domestic products, are already making their way through Congress as part of a bill introduced by Representative John Dingell (D-Michigan), chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee. The bill would also limit the number of U.S. ports that foreign foods could enter to only those equipped with FDA laboratories to help cut down on so-called “port-shopping,” where importers move shoddy products from one port to the next, hoping to eventually slip the product by inspectors.

Efforts to boost the safety of imported food will also hinge on global partnerships. A case in point: In October FDA Commissioner Dr. Andrew von Eschenbach and others met with their Chinese counterparts to discuss import safety. In December the two countries signed an agreement that places new registration and inspection requirements on ten food products exported by Chinese companies. Those products include some preserved foods, pet foods and farm-raised fish, all of which have been suspected of being tainted.

Despite continuing reports of food recalls and contaminations, the United States still has the safest food supply in the world, von Eschenbach stressed.

“But we realize the world is changing,” von Eschenbach acknowledged during a November 2007 teleconference after the FDA presented its Food Protection Plan to the White House. “There was a time when we produced the food ourselves. Now we’ve noticed that much of this food comes to us 365 days a year, because it is being produced in other parts of the world. “Globalization has radically changed our food supply and our food-supply chain,” von Eschenbach added. And that means, he said, that the FDA needs to catch up with those changes.