Critics See Peril in Unchecked Food
By Susan Salisbury, The Palm Beach Post, Fla.
Jul. 22–Standing over a long table covered with white paper, Eduardo Berrios gives the bundle of bright green chives in his gloved hands a vigorous shake.
Then he does it again: shake, shake, shake.
Berrios, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer, is checking a shipment of herbs from Agro-Fresh Gourmet, a food exporter based in Colombia. He’s giving the chives a good shaking for a simple reason: to see whether any insects fall out.
After a moment, he takes out a magnifying lens to look closer.
But he won’t get a closer look at too many more of the other herbs — today it’s oregano, thyme and marjoram — stacked in boxes around him and his co-workers at the United Parcel Service warehouse in Miami.
Each year, customs officials say, agents are able to inspect only about 2 percent of every kind of item that comes into the port. The remaining 98 percent is packed on trucks and sent out across the country.
“We’re … the last line of defense,” said Zachary Mann, a Miami-based Customs agent who serves as the department’s local spokesman. “Once it’s past us, it has made its way into commerce.”
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which is responsible for monitoring the safety of 80 percent of the national food supply, sees even less than customs.
The agency visually inspects only 1.3 percent of food and food ingredient imports and tests only half of 1 percent, said U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., who has long called for the system to be overhauled.
Food imports have risen dramatically during the past 10 years, and recent horror stories about the safety of that food, particularly from China, have put consumers and regulators on edge.
But there also are increasing worries nationally about domestically grown food. There aren’t nearly enough people to do the job on either front, critics say.
“One of the reasons we have these problems is that we have become more globalized,” said U.S. Rep. Allen Boyd, D-Monticello, a member of a House agriculture subcommittee that has offered to beef up the FDA’s inspection budget, provided that the agency comes up with a comprehensive safety-overhaul plan by July 1.
Boyd is correct in that 80 percent of the nation’s seafood, 45 percent of its fruit and 17 percent of its vegetables come from foreign sources, government agencies say. The average American consumes 260 pounds a year of imported foods, including processed and prepared products and single ingredients, government figures show.
“We really do have the safest and least-expensive food supply in the world,” Boyd said. “That does not mean we should not try to improve it.”
A look at the list of recent food horrors might lead consumers to second that notion: #149# Domestically, there were the instances of California spinach teeming with E. coli, and salmonella in peanut butter made in a Georgia plant.
Three deaths and 205 confirmed illnesses were linked to the E. coli outbreak from Natural Selections LLC spinach in September, while 425 people were infected with salmonella-laced Peter Pan peanut butter around February, when the FDA issued an alert.
#149# From abroad, several examples from China have raised regulators’ eyebrows, including fish full of antibiotics and seasoning spray on crunchy vegetable snacks, not to mention toothpaste and pet food containing chemicals usually employed in industrial uses.
The reason for the rash of food-borne perils has partly to do with growing U.S. consumer demand for imported food and an inspection force that critics say is far too small to keep adequate track of things that might go wrong.
The U.S. imports more of its food supply each year, which has increased pressure on the inspection force. In 2006, food imports amounted to $1.845 trillion, more than double the $862.4 billion the country imported in 1996, according to the U.S. International Trade Commission.
Another key agency in the food inspection workforce is the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees meat and poultry plants.
Although critics say the USDA doesn’t have enough people for that critical role, either, it does have about 7,400 inspectors to check out around 6,000 meat-processing facilities.
“The FDA is severely underfunded,” said Tony Corbo, a lobbyist with Food & Water Watch, a nonprofit consumer rights organization in Washington, D.C.
“They claim they have 1,900 field personnel dealing with food safety. There are 298,000 foreign and domestic food establishments within FDA’s jurisdiction,” he said. “With 298,000 establishments, there is no way in hell these people are doing an adequate job.”
J. Luis Rodriguez, trade adviser for Lake Worth-based Florida Farmers Inc., said the FDA needs to hire an additional 25,000 inspectors. He points out that the U.S. Government Accountability Office estimates there are about 5,000 deaths each year in the U.S. from food-borne illness.
“Why are we so afraid to enforce the law? Is it because we have four or five major food packers in this country?” he said. “If the government is not going to enforce safety over our food, then we don’t need any of these agencies. Just get rid of FDA and USDA.”
There’s no denying the job is daunting. Evidence of that is easy to see at Dante B. Fascell Port of Miami.
Thousands of containers from around the world are lined up in rows and stacked two or three containers deep. China is the port’s top trading partner, with more than 1 million tons of imports in 2006, mostly merchandise such as furniture, apparel and other manufactured goods, said port spokeswoman Andria Muniz-Amador.
Although customs officers such as Berrios are working on site at the port, the FDA says it has no employees there.
But Miami-Dade International Airport, which ranks first among U.S. airports for receiving perishable international freight, has more than 300 inspectors from the FDA, the USDA, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and customs working there.
Customs has the manpower to check just 2 percent of each shipment of like items, such as all mangoes or all bananas.
Kirkland Kearse, supervisor of the customs trade enforcement team for cargo in Miami, said about 2 percent of a shipment is inspected in most cases. But if there are different types of items, such as mint and oregano, then 2 percent of the mint would be checked and 2 percent of the oregano, Kearse said.
The FDA receives notice of all arrivals, said spokeswoman Cathy McDermott. Some don’t make it past the entry point.
In May, for instance, the FDA rejected 1,670 shipments of food, drugs and cosmetics nationwide. The top countries on the rejection list were the Dominican Republic, with 226 rejected shipments; China, with 165; Mexico, with 162; and India, with 153. Italy ranked a distant fifth, with 55.
The most rejections were for vegetables and vegetable products at 255, followed by fish or seafood products at 179, human and animal drugs at 118 and cosmetics at 101, FDA figures show.
FDA officials acknowledge that change is needed.
On Tuesday, FDA Commissioner Andrew von Eschenbach told a House subcommittee that recent outbreaks of food-borne illness in the U.S. and drug residues in farm-raised Chinese seafood “underscore the need to develop new multidisciplinary and integrated food strategies at FDA.”
On Thursday, the Senate Agriculture Appropriations subcommittee proposed $48.4 million in new funding for FDA food safety initiatives, including $21 million to increase food inspections and $11 million to develop rapid-response methods. Also proposed is an additional $38 million for the Food Safety and Inspection Services at the USDA. The bill next goes to the Senate for approval.
Also Thursday, President Bush created an import-safety panel, and on July 31, FDA teams and Chinese food-safety officials will have a five-day conference in Beijing.
Chris Waldrop, spokesman for the Washington, D.C.-based Consumer Federation of America, said his group supports the Food Safety Act that Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., introduced in 2005. Among other things, it calls for modernization of food safety laws and the creation of a single food safety agency.
“There hasn’t been a whole lot of movement,” Waldrop said of the legislation. “There is resistance from industry and from politicians worried about the creation of another bureaucracy. There is not enough of a groundswell in Congress to get it passed.”
Out of frustration over the lack of action, the Coalition for a Stronger FDA was formed in 2006. Its membership of 50 nonprofit, consumer and industry groups and companies includes the Grocery Manufacturers Association, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, Pepsico Inc. and the American Spice Trade Association.
The coalition and another advocacy group, The FDA Alliance, said the Senate bill’s proposed $1.75 billion for the total FDA budget, while larger than the House’s $1.7 billion, is still not enough. They say the FDA needs a total of $2 billion, the amount it received in 2003.
“We are working with a huge, broad coalition to increase their funding so they can respond to incidents and prevent them,” Waldrop said. “As it stands now, they can’t. They are chasing events.”
—–
To see more of The Palm Beach Post — including its homes, jobs, cars and other classified listings — or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.palmbeachpost.com.
Copyright (c) 2007, The Palm Beach Post, Fla.
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
For reprints, email tmsreprints@permissionsgroup.com, call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA.