Food safetyShutdown paralyzes U.S. food safety regime

Food safety experts this week said that the government shutdown is putting Americans at risk, as the shutdown caused all inspections of domestic food, except meat and poultry, to be halted. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had to rely on emergency rules to recall furloughed inspectors after a drug-resistant salmonella outbreak in eighteen states sickened hundreds of people.

The New York Times reports that fruit, vegetables, dairy products, and all other domestically produced food are not being inspected as a result of the shutdown.

“This is a self-inflicted wound that is putting people’s health at risk,” Representative Rosa DeLauro (D-Connecticut), a longtime food safety advocate, told the Times.

She noted that the shutdown comes on top of earlier budget cuts to food safety-related agencies, cuts which have already made the food safety inspection regime weaker, so that the shutdown is “creating the potential for a real public health crisis.”

The shutdown is hurting farmers as well. Crucial agriculture reports used by traders and farmers have been canceled, hampering decisions about planting and disrupting commodities markets. The Times notes that highest-profile report canceled as a result of the shutdown is World Agriculture Supply and Demand Estimates, which provides statistics on the worldwide production of crops from cotton to corn. It also provides data on other agricultural products, including meat and sugar.

“It leaves the commodities market in a bit of a fog,” said Christopher Narayan, an analyst with the bank Société Générale in New York, saying investors would face difficulties finding accurate information.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which is in charge of inspecting most of the food consumed in the United States, normally inspects about 200 plants per week, has inspected none since the shutdown began, and has reduced inspections of imported food. The FDA, even during normal times, inspects only 2 percent of imported food, and the agency says it now inspects less than that as a result of the shutdown.

The Agriculture Department (USDA) has closed its meat and poultry hot line, which consumers and producers use to report incidents of contaminated meat, and the CDC has furloughed about 68 percent of its staff, including epidemiologists and scientists who maintain the database that tracks food-borne illness.

One area which has been spared much of the limitations imposed by sequestration and the current shutdown is the USDA meat inspection, federal law requires inspectors at meat and poultry processing plants for these plants to operate.

The FDA appears to be the agency most affected by budget worries. The Times notes that the agency has contracts with states to continue some inspections because those inspections were paid for with money from the previous fiscal year, but nearly 9,000 inspections which were to be performed by the states in the current fiscal year have been put on hold because of a lack of money.

Then there is the new food safety law – the 2011 FDA Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) – which gave the FDA enhance inspection and enforcement power. The implementation of the law was first delayed by the sequestration and will now be further delayed because of the shutdown.

“This puts a strain on an already strained system and raises serious concern about the safety of the food we eat,” Tony Corbo, a lobbyist for Food and Water Watch, a food safety advocacy group, told the Times.