Efforts to monitor quality of imported food increase

Last year, supermarkets in the United States removed fresh spinach from their shelves after three people died and nearly 200 were sickened by E. coli carried by the spinach.Earlier this year, hundreds of people became ill from salmonella poisoning traced to peanut butter. More recently, U.S. officials blamed pet food from China for the deaths of a number of cats and dogs. The U.S. government placed an import alert on five types of Chinese seafood because inspectors found them to contain traces of unauthorized antibiotics. A California-based Chinese importer of safood is now being investigated for colluding with Chinese fishing company in selling the poisonous puffer fish to restaurants in the Midweat — and mislabeling the fish as “bok.” Several Illinois residents were taken ill as a result. The list is long, and it is getting longer. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) top food safety official, David Acheson, told VOA that imports are increasingly a problem because of changing American consumer demand. “And what that is doing is it’s driving the importation market and really getting at the issue of the global food supply. American consumers are expecting fresh produce and seafood year round.”

The U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) says food imports more than doubled in the last decade to nearly $80 billion. At the same time, the Bush administration, during the past five years, has systematically reduced the number of FDA officials assigned to inspect food shipments. Of the nearly nine million total food shipments coming into the United States annually, Acheson says FDA officials are only able physically to examine about 1 percent in a laboratory. “What is enough? How do you define enough? Arguably, unless every food item is held, inspected and tested for every chemical, microbiological contaminant that you can think of, you don’t have enough. Clearly, that’s not practical. We would never have the resources to do that.”

Daniel Fabricant says the FDA is doing the best it can with severely limited resources. Fabricant is with the Natural Products Association, a non-profit group that represents the natural products industry. “I think ,with the amount of food that comes into the country on a daily basis, they (the FDA) really haven’t received a great deal of federal funding, their budget’s been cut historically for quite some time now, I think what’s being expected of them may be a little much.” Fabricant says most ingredients for natural products come from China. For example, he says China provides about 80 percent of the vitamin C throughout the entire industry worldwide.

Imports have come under increased scrutiny in the United States. In July President Bush established a high-level U.S. government panel to look at ways better to guarantee the safety of food and other products shipped to the United States. Industry is also taking its own steps to improve food safety. One example is a new partnership between the Natural Products Association and U.S. Pharmacopeia, the private group that sets U.S. government standards for drugs and food additives. Starting in September, U.S. Pharmacopeia’s lab in Shanghai will test Chinese raw ingredients for purity and the results will go into a database. That way, U.S. companies looking to source raw materials from China will have access to a list of names of certified Chinese suppliers.