Food-safety measure reflects global reality

WASHINGTON – In a world where we get garlic from China, shellfish from Thailand and sugar cane from Mexico, Congress is ready to approve a food-safety bill that would strengthen the nation’s top regulator and impose new rules on domestic production and trading partners.

The legislation is aimed at preventing tainted food from entering the supply chain, sickening Americans and forcing huge recalls. It would give the Food and Drug Administration new powers to demand recalls and require importers to certify the safety of what they’re bringing into this country.

By allowing regulators, for instance, to react more quickly to reports of illness, the legislation could limit or prevent recalls such as those of spinach and peanuts in recent years, supporters said.

The House is expected to pass the measure today, sending it to President Barack Obama for his signature.

“This is a once-in-a-lifetime update. A lot has changed since 1938,” when the current food regulatory regime was established, said Ami Gadhia, policy counsel for the nonprofit Consumers Union. “This will put FDA in a posture to prevent food-borne illness before it happens.”

The bill also will be good for business because “it’s going to provide a measure of security and certainty that there’s a system in place and bad actors will be weeded out. It’s going to save business costly recalls,” Gadhia said.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last week said tainted food is responsible for 3,000 deaths and 48 million illnesses a year.

But even with new powers, federal regulators may be hard-pressed to overcome a challenge that has grown in recent years: Food-safety rules changed little over the last 70 years even as the U.S. food chain evolved into a global network including foreign growers, producers and processors over whom the United States has little or no direct control.

About 80 percent of seafood and one-third of fruits and nuts come from abroad. Foreign sources also account for significant shares of certain ingredients even though the finished products are made in the United States. Most cereals, for example, include supplemental vitamins that primarily come from China.

Most of the high-profile recalls in recent years involved problems with domestic producers. But the increasing flow of food from overseas has vastly complicated the challenge of protecting the nation’s food supply, and new power to regulate foreign foodstuffs and components of domestically produced products is a critical part of the pending legislation.

“FDA is able to inspect only about 1 percent of the food imported into the U.S.,” said Erik Olson, deputy director of the Pew Health Group. “Right now, we don’t have a standard for meeting U.S. requirements.”