The Progressive Policy Institute has just published a 10 page note by Jessica Milano about guaranteeing the food safety, with special reference to the safety of food imports: Spoiled: Keeping Tainted Food off American Tables (September 2007):
Responsibility for monitoring foreign foods is split among two agencies: the Agriculture Department's Food Safety Inspection Service, where 7,865 experts review meat, poultry and processed eggs, or roughly 21 percent of the food supply; and the Food and Drug Administration, where 1,946 hard-pressed inspectors cover the seafood, dairy, grains, vegetables and fruits that account for the remaining 81 percent. The two agencies' standards and procedures differ, with FDA trying to inspect individual foreign factories while FSIS makes broader judgments on whether foreign trading partners' overall health and safety regulation matches American domestic standards. And sometimes the division breaks down altogether, with FDA asserting jurisdiction over frozen cheese pizzas while FSIS covers pepperoni.
Milano suggests five measures to bring health and safety standards into line with changing farm trade and eating habits:
- Combine the USDA and FSIS inspectors into a single food inspection service with consistent standards;
- Double spending on food safety, and quintuple the total inspectors available for the FDA's seafood, dairy, grains and vegetables responsibilities. (Cost is $130 million; the paper suggests financing it by eliminating two redundant export-promotion agencies.)
- Strengthen government food recall authority.
- Allocate resources by risk of source;
- Capitalize on Container Security Initiative and Bioterrorism Act authority to conduct more point-of-entry inspections.
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