In a new e-newsletter, Global Food Safety Monitor, IATP's Steve Suppan will "cover the challenges of setting strong international food safety regulations that protect public health. In the first issue, Steve writes about the U.S.-Korea Beef dispute, attempts to reach a food safety agreement between the U.S. and China, and a U.S. dispute with the European Union over chicken exports."
In this first issues, Steve Suppan says, "We won’t neglect good news. If a new pathogen detection test shows promise, if good food safety legislation is approved or if a company does more than required by law to ensure that traded food is safe, we will endeavor to report it. We hope that the readers of this bulletin will not only respond critically to it, but send some of that good news our way."
Thursday, August 14, 2008
Thursday, July 24, 2008
Local and Traded Food
Reasonable people may believe that there are relative benefits to be derived from locally-produced food and from food traded over a longer distance (including internationally). Local food advocacy has become very prominent, and its views have often been expressed at the expense of traded food. While not disputing the value of local food, it appears to have acquired a very heavy ideological burden: Local food is good for (local) farmers, it is good for consumers, for the environment, for the local economy, and for overall health and nutrition. Moreover, local food is represented as being fresher (no matter how long after harvesting it is purchased), it is safer, and it tastes better. This is a lot to expect of food simply on the basis of how far away from a consumer it was grown.
On the other hand, internationally-traded food is often villified, regardless of the type of food it is, who produced it (and under what conditions), who sold it, or who prepares or eats it. Take as one example the International Society for Ecology and Culture's report on "Rethinking California's Food Economy," which states that "economic globalization is at the heart of almost every problem of the food system."
While international trade is only one component of "economic globalization," and food is only one set of products traded internationally, this is a heavy burden for international-traded food to bear. It is time to rationally re-assess and begin to re-engineer the international trade in food before we are all forced by locavores to grow our own or the industrial food giants to eat theirs.
On the other hand, internationally-traded food is often villified, regardless of the type of food it is, who produced it (and under what conditions), who sold it, or who prepares or eats it. Take as one example the International Society for Ecology and Culture's report on "Rethinking California's Food Economy," which states that "economic globalization is at the heart of almost every problem of the food system."
While international trade is only one component of "economic globalization," and food is only one set of products traded internationally, this is a heavy burden for international-traded food to bear. It is time to rationally re-assess and begin to re-engineer the international trade in food before we are all forced by locavores to grow our own or the industrial food giants to eat theirs.
Friday, May 9, 2008
Sustainable Food Trade Project Launched
The Houston Center for Food System Research and Development has launched a "Sustainable Food Trade Project." The Project has the goal of transforming criticisms of the "food trade" into dynamic mechanisms by which more sustainable food systems can be developed. The Houston Food Trade Policy Forum will post developments from this project and solicits comments.
Monday, December 31, 2007
The Importance of Food to the Houston Area
Food has multiple meanings, dramatic economic significance, a wide range of qualities, and important health, nutition, and environmental consequences.
The viability of the Houston Area "food system" depends on developing linkages between the individuals, organizations, institutions, and interests that are involved in food.
The viability of the Houston Area "food system" depends on developing linkages between the individuals, organizations, institutions, and interests that are involved in food.
Friday, August 31, 2007
Import-Export Business: How globalization is smothering U.S. fruit and vegetable farms
By Tom Philpott
Grist Magazine 30 Aug 2007
Earlier this month, President Bush roiled U.S. vegetable farmers by announcing a crackdown on undocumented workers. Last week, industrial-meat giant Smithfield Foods goosed the hog-futures market by inking a deal to export 60 million pounds of U.S.-grown pork to China. These events, unrelated though they seem, illustrate a common point: that despite all the recent fuss around local food, the globalized food system, far from losing strength, continues to gain traction.
The apple doesn't fall far from the tree -- especially if no one's there to pick it.
Unwittingly or not, Bush's move puts a heavy squeeze on large-scale U.S. vegetable growers, and will likely result in more food hauled in from nations with weaker environmental regulations. Smithfield's triumph in China reflects that nation's diminishing food-production capacity -- one of the prices it has paid for its rise to global manufacturing preeminence. As more and more industrially produced food whips around the globe, the result is more pressure on soil and water resources, more greenhouse-gas emissions, and more fertile land made vulnerable to suburban sprawl. In this article and the next, I'll attempt to illuminate how global economic forces shift food production from one place to another, to the detriment of local communities and the environment alike.
Bottom of the Barrel
As U.S. fruit and vegetable farms have scaled up to meet the demands of increasingly large buyers like Wal-Mart, they've come to rely on a steady supply of low-wage and highly flexible workers, willing to toil long hours at peak seasons and make themselves scarce when not needed. Moreover, these mega-farms increasingly specialize in one or two crops, and rely heavily on poisons to keep pests and weeds away. Thus in addition to being poorly paid and monotonous, the work tends to be dangerous -- and undesirable for anyone with other options.
Not surprisingly, according to most estimates, 70 percent of U.S. farmworkers are undocumented, the great bulk of them underground refugees from the devastated rural economies of Mexico and Central America. For several seasons now, fruit and vegetable farmers have had to scramble to find enough workers to harvest their crops. One factor in the labor shortage has been an increasingly militarized border, making it more difficult for would-be workers to cross over. Another has been the building boom, which has lured undocumented workers into higher-paying construction jobs.Thus farmers in production centers like California and Arizona were already tense about the labor situation when Bush rolled out his hodgepodge of measures designed to force farmers (and other employers) to stop relying on undocumented workers. (For the record, as I've written before, I think it's schizophrenic and childish to make a big show of hunting down and deporting the people who feed you.) Farmers across the country quickly cried foul. In New York's Hudson Valley, where workers come from Mexico and Central America, apple growers fear a bumper crop could largely wither on the branches. "We have 3 billion apples to pick this fall and every single one of them has to be picked by hand," one grower told The New York Times. "It's a very labor-intensive industry, and there is no local labor supply that we can draw from, as much as we try. No one locally really wants to pick apples for six weeks in the fall."Down in Arizona -- epicenter of winter vegetable production in the U.S. -- farmers are taking a cue from their peers in Colorado and desperately hiring inmate labor. But an Arizona prison official acknowledged to The Christian Science Monitor that, as in Colorado, inmates can offset only a fraction of the state's farm-labor shortage. Bush's move came at the height of harvest season in California -- source of about half of the fruits and vegetables grown in the U.S. "I'm guessing 80, 90 percent of the ag work force is illegal," one grower told the Associated Press. "Implementing this rule will be catastrophic."
Less Veggies, More Sprawl
In a well-functioning market, farmers would raise wages to draw in more workers, and pass the increased costs on to their buyers: the big supermarkets, restaurant chains, and food processors. But as a California Farm Bureau official told AP, those entities will likely reject domestic price hikes and look to other parts of the world for produce. "If our guys try to raise prices, they are going to be replaced by foreign production," he said. In essence, he's arguing that fruit and vegetable farming, like manufacturing over the past generation, has entered a "race to the bottom": a relentless hunt for cheap labor markets and lax regulatory regimes.Is that just Farm Bureau spin? Not likely. Indeed, the U.S. is already outsourcing an increasing share of its fruit and veg production. As this USDA backgrounder [PDF] from April 2006 shows, the import share of U.S. vegetable consumption has been rising steadily, from about 7 percent in 1990 to 14 percent in 2005. Fruit imports (excluding bananas) as a percentage of consumption have also doubled, rising from 12 percent in 1992-1994 to 24 percent in 2002-2004. Much of that jump can be explained by off-season purchases -- the Chilean-asparagus-in-January effect.
But with marketing relationships and trade infrastructure in place, nothing stops distributors from buying, say, cheaper Mexico-grown lettuce over California product, or New Zealand apples over those grown in New York or Washington. California has already seen its once-huge garlic production dwindle, overwhelmed by a flood of cheap -- and nearly flavorless -- Chinese-grown garlic into the U.S. market. What happens when farmers can no longer work their land profitably? They generally sell it to developers, and land under cultivation succumbs to low-density sprawl. Again, that's already happening in California. In the state's lush Central Valley, home to probably the nation's most valuable territory for growing fruits and vegetables, developers bulldozed 100,000 acres of prime farmland in the 1990s alone, according to American Farmland Trust. If present trends continue, AFT warns, another million acres of farmland could vanish within a generation. Meanwhile, production of the fruits and vegetables we consume shifts to nations with even weaker regulatory regimes than ours, meaning more insecticides and other agricultural chemicals released into the biosphere. And increasing distances mean burning more fossil fuel to haul that suspect bounty from farm to table. While these grand global trends are indeed overwhelming to think about, there's no need to feel disempowered. Get involved with burgeoning movements, nationwide and globally, to rebuild local (and, yes, regional) food systems that don't thrive by exploiting labor and trashing the land.
Meanwhile, while U.S. vegetable farming gets squeezed between labor shortages and global competition, other, less labor-intensive forms of U.S. agriculture -- namely industrial grain and meat production -- thrive in the global marketplace. And that will be the topic of the next column.
Grist contributing writer Tom Philpott farms and cooks at Maverick Farms, a sustainable-agriculture nonprofit and small farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina.
Grist Magazine 30 Aug 2007
Earlier this month, President Bush roiled U.S. vegetable farmers by announcing a crackdown on undocumented workers. Last week, industrial-meat giant Smithfield Foods goosed the hog-futures market by inking a deal to export 60 million pounds of U.S.-grown pork to China. These events, unrelated though they seem, illustrate a common point: that despite all the recent fuss around local food, the globalized food system, far from losing strength, continues to gain traction.
The apple doesn't fall far from the tree -- especially if no one's there to pick it.
Unwittingly or not, Bush's move puts a heavy squeeze on large-scale U.S. vegetable growers, and will likely result in more food hauled in from nations with weaker environmental regulations. Smithfield's triumph in China reflects that nation's diminishing food-production capacity -- one of the prices it has paid for its rise to global manufacturing preeminence. As more and more industrially produced food whips around the globe, the result is more pressure on soil and water resources, more greenhouse-gas emissions, and more fertile land made vulnerable to suburban sprawl. In this article and the next, I'll attempt to illuminate how global economic forces shift food production from one place to another, to the detriment of local communities and the environment alike.
Bottom of the Barrel
As U.S. fruit and vegetable farms have scaled up to meet the demands of increasingly large buyers like Wal-Mart, they've come to rely on a steady supply of low-wage and highly flexible workers, willing to toil long hours at peak seasons and make themselves scarce when not needed. Moreover, these mega-farms increasingly specialize in one or two crops, and rely heavily on poisons to keep pests and weeds away. Thus in addition to being poorly paid and monotonous, the work tends to be dangerous -- and undesirable for anyone with other options.
Not surprisingly, according to most estimates, 70 percent of U.S. farmworkers are undocumented, the great bulk of them underground refugees from the devastated rural economies of Mexico and Central America. For several seasons now, fruit and vegetable farmers have had to scramble to find enough workers to harvest their crops. One factor in the labor shortage has been an increasingly militarized border, making it more difficult for would-be workers to cross over. Another has been the building boom, which has lured undocumented workers into higher-paying construction jobs.Thus farmers in production centers like California and Arizona were already tense about the labor situation when Bush rolled out his hodgepodge of measures designed to force farmers (and other employers) to stop relying on undocumented workers. (For the record, as I've written before, I think it's schizophrenic and childish to make a big show of hunting down and deporting the people who feed you.) Farmers across the country quickly cried foul. In New York's Hudson Valley, where workers come from Mexico and Central America, apple growers fear a bumper crop could largely wither on the branches. "We have 3 billion apples to pick this fall and every single one of them has to be picked by hand," one grower told The New York Times. "It's a very labor-intensive industry, and there is no local labor supply that we can draw from, as much as we try. No one locally really wants to pick apples for six weeks in the fall."Down in Arizona -- epicenter of winter vegetable production in the U.S. -- farmers are taking a cue from their peers in Colorado and desperately hiring inmate labor. But an Arizona prison official acknowledged to The Christian Science Monitor that, as in Colorado, inmates can offset only a fraction of the state's farm-labor shortage. Bush's move came at the height of harvest season in California -- source of about half of the fruits and vegetables grown in the U.S. "I'm guessing 80, 90 percent of the ag work force is illegal," one grower told the Associated Press. "Implementing this rule will be catastrophic."
Less Veggies, More Sprawl
In a well-functioning market, farmers would raise wages to draw in more workers, and pass the increased costs on to their buyers: the big supermarkets, restaurant chains, and food processors. But as a California Farm Bureau official told AP, those entities will likely reject domestic price hikes and look to other parts of the world for produce. "If our guys try to raise prices, they are going to be replaced by foreign production," he said. In essence, he's arguing that fruit and vegetable farming, like manufacturing over the past generation, has entered a "race to the bottom": a relentless hunt for cheap labor markets and lax regulatory regimes.Is that just Farm Bureau spin? Not likely. Indeed, the U.S. is already outsourcing an increasing share of its fruit and veg production. As this USDA backgrounder [PDF] from April 2006 shows, the import share of U.S. vegetable consumption has been rising steadily, from about 7 percent in 1990 to 14 percent in 2005. Fruit imports (excluding bananas) as a percentage of consumption have also doubled, rising from 12 percent in 1992-1994 to 24 percent in 2002-2004. Much of that jump can be explained by off-season purchases -- the Chilean-asparagus-in-January effect.
But with marketing relationships and trade infrastructure in place, nothing stops distributors from buying, say, cheaper Mexico-grown lettuce over California product, or New Zealand apples over those grown in New York or Washington. California has already seen its once-huge garlic production dwindle, overwhelmed by a flood of cheap -- and nearly flavorless -- Chinese-grown garlic into the U.S. market. What happens when farmers can no longer work their land profitably? They generally sell it to developers, and land under cultivation succumbs to low-density sprawl. Again, that's already happening in California. In the state's lush Central Valley, home to probably the nation's most valuable territory for growing fruits and vegetables, developers bulldozed 100,000 acres of prime farmland in the 1990s alone, according to American Farmland Trust. If present trends continue, AFT warns, another million acres of farmland could vanish within a generation. Meanwhile, production of the fruits and vegetables we consume shifts to nations with even weaker regulatory regimes than ours, meaning more insecticides and other agricultural chemicals released into the biosphere. And increasing distances mean burning more fossil fuel to haul that suspect bounty from farm to table. While these grand global trends are indeed overwhelming to think about, there's no need to feel disempowered. Get involved with burgeoning movements, nationwide and globally, to rebuild local (and, yes, regional) food systems that don't thrive by exploiting labor and trashing the land.
Meanwhile, while U.S. vegetable farming gets squeezed between labor shortages and global competition, other, less labor-intensive forms of U.S. agriculture -- namely industrial grain and meat production -- thrive in the global marketplace. And that will be the topic of the next column.
Grist contributing writer Tom Philpott farms and cooks at Maverick Farms, a sustainable-agriculture nonprofit and small farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina.
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
China food safety woes show U.S. vulnerability
It's not what you eat but where it comes from
By Emre Peker, Medill News Service
Last Update: 12:01 AM ET Aug 29, 2007
WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- First, back in 2006, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration banned Chinese honey that was found to be contaminated with potentially harmful antibiotics. Then, in May of this year, the FDA traced a tainted supply of pet food to a Chinese supplier of wheat gluten. A month later, the agency added shrimp, catfish and eel to its growing list of Chinese imports that are threatening consumer safety.
Despite all these headlines and the ensuing flurry of finger-pointing on Capitol Hill, China is not the worst offender: It ranks third behind Mexico and India among countries whose products have been refused by the FDA, the government agency responsible for safeguarding about 80% of America's food supply. The Department of Agriculture is responsible for regulating the other 20%, specifically meat, poultry and processed egg products.
Federal agencies have the power to detain and ban imports, and lawmakers have promised to take action to better safeguard the country's food supply. However, the recent spate of Chinese food safety breaches highlights a new problem: As domestic consumption of imported food rises and foreign produce enters the U.S. from more than 300 ports, the FDA's capacity to monitor import safety simply cannot keep up.
"More and more of these imports are coming from developing nations, which don't have strong regulatory systems," said William Hubbard, former associate commissioner of the FDA, in an interview with MarketWatch. "Today you have food coming in huge volumes from hundreds of countries and many different types of food... The world has changed radically ... [and] these changes pose a problem."
America's reliance on imported food grew by more than 30% over 10 years, with imports reaching 15% of total food consumption in 2005, according to a July report by the Congressional Research Service. The report also showed the amount of Chinese food exports to the U.S. more than tripled from 1996 to 2006 to 1.8 million metric tons, enough food to feed about 2 million Americans for a whole year.
Meanwhile, the FDA, by its own numbers, inspected 1% or less of all incoming products in 2006, down from 1.7% in 1996.
Over the past year, the FDA has come under increased scrutiny for failing to protect the national food supply. Even before China made headlines with unsafe products, consumers also heard warnings about contamination of domestically produced spinach, lettuce and peanut butter, all of which were recalled.
"It's just suddenly coming to the fore that we have problems [and] that we have to drastically revise our systems," said Jean Halloran, director of food policy initiatives at Consumers Union.
"Frankly, I don't want to rely on [self-policing] -- it only works when there is some enforcement."
Unsafe food takes a significant toll on the public. Each year, nearly 76 million Americans contract food-borne diseases, about 325,000 require hospitalization and about 5,000 die, according to a Government Accountability Office report released in February.
The GAO characterized the nation's food safety system as "high risk," noting "inconsistent oversight, ineffective coordination and inefficient use of resources." Adding to these problems are the changing nature of and the increasing dependence on food imports to the U.S.
Take, for example, wheat gluten, a high-protein product used in baked goods, vegetarian fake meat, pet foods, chicken nuggets, turkey burgers and imitation crabmeat. The U.S. imports 80% of the wheat gluten it consumes, including 14% from China. Also consider a product banned in the U.S.: melamine, which can enhance the protein content of animal feed but is digestible only by animals with more than one stomach, such as cows.
Two Chinese companies used melamine to boost the protein content of wheat gluten, which was sold to the U.S. and ended up in American-produced pet food. The FDA said it received more than 17,000 related consumer complaints related to the contamination, including the reported deaths of more than 4,000 cats and dogs.
"There are definitely times when things happen we don't expect," said Dr. David Acheson, recently appointed as the FDA's assistant commissioner for food protection. "Melamine in wheat gluten was an example of that. We did not consider wheat gluten to be a high-risk product."
In today's global food chain, the FDA's inspection of only one in 100 imports may not be enough to identify unexpected problems. Acheson maintains that the solution is not a higher number of inspections, but "more sophisticated and smarter" inspections. However, some trade partners still manage to get by with a little punishment, some happenstance and a bit of cunning.
In one instance, a government investigation found that after the FDA banned toothpaste from certain Chinese exporters for containing a deadly ingredient substituted to cut costs, brokers continued to import the item under the guise of a toothbrush, which was combined with the original product.
The ongoing entry of substandard products to the U.S. illustrates the holes in America's food safety net, but lawmakers and the FDA have different ideas for fixing it.
Incensed by the continued news of contaminated imports, Congress took action this year. Lawmakers held hearings, introduced legislation and even considered food's vulnerability to terrorist plots.
"The recent series of tainted food recalls has focused America's attention on the sorry state of federal oversight of the domestic food supply," said House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman John Dingell, D-Mich. "This must change."
On the other hand, the FDA is calling for "enhanced collaboration" with foreign countries and "industry vigilance." The FDA proposal contained a controversial clause that would close seven of its 13 field laboratories over two years and consolidate its operations in six centrally controlled super labs, but that was recently withdrawn after consumer groups and lawmakers said the measure would further limit the agency's oversight capabilities.
The agency's proposal, which stresses risk assessment and stronger scientific analysis, came under fire during a House committee food safety hearing in July.
"The administration thinks that a leaner and meaner system is going to protect American consumers, but in fact it puts them at greater risk," said Dingell, who came out with a draft food safety bill before Congress went on recess in August.
Of the FDA proposal, Acheson said, "The goal is to test more products, to test it faster and to test it more efficiently and therefore cheaper. The shift here for the agency is trying to move more from being reactive, more to being proactive in terms of preventing the problems in the first place."
The FDA has field employees in about 90 ports of entry, about a quarter of all ports that receive agency-regulated imports. The government investigation found that during a typical day in the FDA's San Francisco office, which the agency wants to close, a safety reviewer would check about 1,000 entries -- or about one entry line every 30 seconds. It also said a single entry of Chinese herbs can take more than one hour to review.
Dingell's draft bill calls for charging manufacturers and importers user fees of about $500 million a year, restricting entries to ports in metropolitan areas with FDA labs, barring the agency's lab closures and consolidations, boosting civil fines and creating a certification system that would require foreign producers to meet U.S. standards. Committee staffers said the draft legislation would be finalized and introduced in the fall.
Other lawmakers have put forth similar bills, two of which aim to create a Food Safety Administration that would consolidate the review process in one agency.
Hubbard, the former FDA assistant commissioner who is now a senior adviser at the Coalition for a Stronger FDA, sees the creation of a single agency as unlikely and instead advocates strengthening the FDA -- fast.
"This isn't just a China issue. There are lots of other developing countries that are sending food to us," Hubbard said. "There's a long way to go, and Congress doesn't seem to be in much of a hurry to get there."
By Emre Peker, Medill News Service
Last Update: 12:01 AM ET Aug 29, 2007
WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- First, back in 2006, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration banned Chinese honey that was found to be contaminated with potentially harmful antibiotics. Then, in May of this year, the FDA traced a tainted supply of pet food to a Chinese supplier of wheat gluten. A month later, the agency added shrimp, catfish and eel to its growing list of Chinese imports that are threatening consumer safety.
Despite all these headlines and the ensuing flurry of finger-pointing on Capitol Hill, China is not the worst offender: It ranks third behind Mexico and India among countries whose products have been refused by the FDA, the government agency responsible for safeguarding about 80% of America's food supply. The Department of Agriculture is responsible for regulating the other 20%, specifically meat, poultry and processed egg products.
Federal agencies have the power to detain and ban imports, and lawmakers have promised to take action to better safeguard the country's food supply. However, the recent spate of Chinese food safety breaches highlights a new problem: As domestic consumption of imported food rises and foreign produce enters the U.S. from more than 300 ports, the FDA's capacity to monitor import safety simply cannot keep up.
"More and more of these imports are coming from developing nations, which don't have strong regulatory systems," said William Hubbard, former associate commissioner of the FDA, in an interview with MarketWatch. "Today you have food coming in huge volumes from hundreds of countries and many different types of food... The world has changed radically ... [and] these changes pose a problem."
America's reliance on imported food grew by more than 30% over 10 years, with imports reaching 15% of total food consumption in 2005, according to a July report by the Congressional Research Service. The report also showed the amount of Chinese food exports to the U.S. more than tripled from 1996 to 2006 to 1.8 million metric tons, enough food to feed about 2 million Americans for a whole year.
Meanwhile, the FDA, by its own numbers, inspected 1% or less of all incoming products in 2006, down from 1.7% in 1996.
Over the past year, the FDA has come under increased scrutiny for failing to protect the national food supply. Even before China made headlines with unsafe products, consumers also heard warnings about contamination of domestically produced spinach, lettuce and peanut butter, all of which were recalled.
"It's just suddenly coming to the fore that we have problems [and] that we have to drastically revise our systems," said Jean Halloran, director of food policy initiatives at Consumers Union.
"Frankly, I don't want to rely on [self-policing] -- it only works when there is some enforcement."
Unsafe food takes a significant toll on the public. Each year, nearly 76 million Americans contract food-borne diseases, about 325,000 require hospitalization and about 5,000 die, according to a Government Accountability Office report released in February.
The GAO characterized the nation's food safety system as "high risk," noting "inconsistent oversight, ineffective coordination and inefficient use of resources." Adding to these problems are the changing nature of and the increasing dependence on food imports to the U.S.
Take, for example, wheat gluten, a high-protein product used in baked goods, vegetarian fake meat, pet foods, chicken nuggets, turkey burgers and imitation crabmeat. The U.S. imports 80% of the wheat gluten it consumes, including 14% from China. Also consider a product banned in the U.S.: melamine, which can enhance the protein content of animal feed but is digestible only by animals with more than one stomach, such as cows.
Two Chinese companies used melamine to boost the protein content of wheat gluten, which was sold to the U.S. and ended up in American-produced pet food. The FDA said it received more than 17,000 related consumer complaints related to the contamination, including the reported deaths of more than 4,000 cats and dogs.
"There are definitely times when things happen we don't expect," said Dr. David Acheson, recently appointed as the FDA's assistant commissioner for food protection. "Melamine in wheat gluten was an example of that. We did not consider wheat gluten to be a high-risk product."
In today's global food chain, the FDA's inspection of only one in 100 imports may not be enough to identify unexpected problems. Acheson maintains that the solution is not a higher number of inspections, but "more sophisticated and smarter" inspections. However, some trade partners still manage to get by with a little punishment, some happenstance and a bit of cunning.
In one instance, a government investigation found that after the FDA banned toothpaste from certain Chinese exporters for containing a deadly ingredient substituted to cut costs, brokers continued to import the item under the guise of a toothbrush, which was combined with the original product.
The ongoing entry of substandard products to the U.S. illustrates the holes in America's food safety net, but lawmakers and the FDA have different ideas for fixing it.
Incensed by the continued news of contaminated imports, Congress took action this year. Lawmakers held hearings, introduced legislation and even considered food's vulnerability to terrorist plots.
"The recent series of tainted food recalls has focused America's attention on the sorry state of federal oversight of the domestic food supply," said House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman John Dingell, D-Mich. "This must change."
On the other hand, the FDA is calling for "enhanced collaboration" with foreign countries and "industry vigilance." The FDA proposal contained a controversial clause that would close seven of its 13 field laboratories over two years and consolidate its operations in six centrally controlled super labs, but that was recently withdrawn after consumer groups and lawmakers said the measure would further limit the agency's oversight capabilities.
The agency's proposal, which stresses risk assessment and stronger scientific analysis, came under fire during a House committee food safety hearing in July.
"The administration thinks that a leaner and meaner system is going to protect American consumers, but in fact it puts them at greater risk," said Dingell, who came out with a draft food safety bill before Congress went on recess in August.
Of the FDA proposal, Acheson said, "The goal is to test more products, to test it faster and to test it more efficiently and therefore cheaper. The shift here for the agency is trying to move more from being reactive, more to being proactive in terms of preventing the problems in the first place."
The FDA has field employees in about 90 ports of entry, about a quarter of all ports that receive agency-regulated imports. The government investigation found that during a typical day in the FDA's San Francisco office, which the agency wants to close, a safety reviewer would check about 1,000 entries -- or about one entry line every 30 seconds. It also said a single entry of Chinese herbs can take more than one hour to review.
Dingell's draft bill calls for charging manufacturers and importers user fees of about $500 million a year, restricting entries to ports in metropolitan areas with FDA labs, barring the agency's lab closures and consolidations, boosting civil fines and creating a certification system that would require foreign producers to meet U.S. standards. Committee staffers said the draft legislation would be finalized and introduced in the fall.
Other lawmakers have put forth similar bills, two of which aim to create a Food Safety Administration that would consolidate the review process in one agency.
Hubbard, the former FDA assistant commissioner who is now a senior adviser at the Coalition for a Stronger FDA, sees the creation of a single agency as unlikely and instead advocates strengthening the FDA -- fast.
"This isn't just a China issue. There are lots of other developing countries that are sending food to us," Hubbard said. "There's a long way to go, and Congress doesn't seem to be in much of a hurry to get there."
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