Food securityIllnesses in U.S. on the rise as a result of decline in foreign food inspections

More Americans get sick as a result of food-borne pathogens. The reason: inspections at foreign food factories shipping food and food ingredients to the United States have declined in recent years, and border inspections of food coming into the country could be next to be reduced.

The New York Times reports that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which is responsible for inspecting all food except meat and poultry, does not have the funds to inspect foreign foods under the new food safety law which Congress passed – but which lawmakers failed to support with enough money.

The Obama proposed administration’s 2014 budget would allocate more money to the FDA, but the money would come from fees which the food industry and Congress strongly oppose. Last month, the agency did receive $40 million in a one-time financing boost to put the new law into effect, but food safety experts say the money is not nearly enough.

In 2011 Congress passed and President Obama signed a comprehensive food safety law which gave the FDA more power, and which mandated more inspections of imported foods and foreign food-processing plants.

The law, however, did not provide funds for the additional inspectors who would be required to carry out the expanded inspections. The lack of money for additional inspectors undermined the new law: the law stipulated that foreign food companies exporting food and food ingredients to the United States, must adhere to the same    sanitation, hygiene, and standards which U.S. food companies follow. The FDA would train and certify private inspectors, paid by the companies, to conduct food safety checks and turn over their reports to the agency.

“We are obviously never going to be able to inspect all the food that comes into the country on our own; we just don’t have the resources,” Michael Taylor, deputy commissioner for foods at the FDA told the Times. “The new law gives us the means to leverage our resources by working with industry and foreign governments and suppliers to ensure the safety of globally traded food.”

The lack of money for inspection of foreign food production practices is worrisome because Americans are eating more and more foreign food each year. Last month a salmonella outbreak from Mexican cucumbers sent at least seventy-three people in nineteen states to the hospital.

Other salmonella outbreaks in the past two years have been traced back to Turkish pine nuts, Mexican papayas, and cantaloupes from Guatemala.

Dr. Richard Raymond, the former undersecretary for food safety at the Agriculture Department in President George W. Bush’s administration, says the decline in the number and scope of food inspections could be dangerous

“We tried to do inspections every year, because if you don’t, people cut corners,” Raymond told the Times. “The decline in in-country inspections appears to be a casualty of tough budgetary times.”

According to a recent study conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), an average of six-and-a-half food-illness outbreaks occurred every year from foreign foods between 2005 and 2010.

The Agriculture Department inspected food in just ten countries last year, as the department’s inspection budget has declined 18 percent over the last ten years. Four years ago the agency inspected food in thirty-two countries.

Richard McIntyre, a spokesman for the Agriculture Department Food Safety Inspection Service, said in an e-mail to the Times that any changes to inspections are not related to budget cuts or trade pressures. Instead, the agency is taking a “risk-based approach” concentrating on problem countries. Australia, Canada, and New Zealand have good food safety regulations, according to McIntyre, and will be inspected every two or three years.

Some food safety advocates, however, are not persuaded. 

“This policy change puts the health of customers at risk,” Representative Rosa DeLauro (D-Connecticut) told the Times.

The plan to stop food inspections at the border is what worries most advocates, especially Wally Piatkowski, the operator of the border facility in Niagara Falls, New York.

Last year government inspectors in Montana caught a shipment of beef tainted with E. coli from a Canadian processing plant, which led to one of the largest recalls in Canadian history.

“That should have served as a wake-up call for these plans to eliminate border inspections,” Piatkowski told the Times. “At the border, it is guaranteed 100 percent that that meat is going to be destroyed or sent back to Canada and has zero chances of entering the food supply.