Food safety concerns grow as imports to US surge
The FDA is able to inspect only 0.7 percent of all imported food products from more than 130 countries.
from the May 8, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 3
Concerns have mounted, Representative De Lauro says, as details have tumbled out from FDA investigations in China showing that melamine-contaminated wheat gluten made it into American pet food. The FDA found that more than 700 tons of mislabeled wheat gluten were shipped out of China through a third-party textile company.
"This is an issue that is going to explode. … There is probably no food supply as open as ours in the world," says Richard George, professor of food marketing at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia. "Up to now we've been able to dodge bullets, but the problems we are beginning to see from China are likely just the tip of the iceberg."
More than 130 countries ship food to the United States. According to the FDA, the volume of food imports has been growing steadily – about 15 percent on average per year since 1991. Imported food now makes up more than 10 percent of the food Americans consume, according to the USDA.
Congress in 2002 passed the Bioterrorism Preparedness Act, designed in part to improve food safety. It includes new rules on how all domestic and foreign food facilities must register with the FDA – and give notice for any shipments of human or animal food.
Yet the FDA is able to inspect only 0.7 percent of all imported food products, down from 1.1 percent the previous year. In 2006, that means the FDA inspected just 20,662 shipments out of more than 8.9 million that arrived in US ports – employing about 1,750 food inspectors for ports and domestic food-production plants.
"We have all known for years that the FDA doesn't have enough money or inspectors to do what they need to because of congressional budget cutting," says Jenny Scott of the Food Products Association. "We are going to have to free up more resources for them, and we are going to have to be smarter in how we use them."
Others say that increasing the FDA's budget – even doubling the number of inspections – would still not come close to protecting American consumers. They suggest that importing companies adopt their own standards of inspection, as was done by produce-growing associations in California, which have declared voluntary guidelines for handling food from field to dinner table.
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