U.S. Food Safety: The Import Alarm Keeps Sounding

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The reason for the shortfall is simple, Doyle said: "Reduced budgets."

The bottom line, according to FDA figures, is that its inspectors now sample just 1.3 percent of all imported food shipments entering the country.

However, simply boosting the number of inspectors may not be the solution, said Michael Rogers, who helps oversee FDA foreign and domestic inspections as director of the FDA's division of field investigations.

"With more [money], certainly more inspections can be done," he said, "but that's not the panacea for total public heath protection." Instead , Rogers said, collaborating with business and foreign governments to help spot tainted food before it reaches this country, which is part of the Food Protection Plan, may be the most important step the agency can take.

Certainly, the agency currently performs relatively few on-site inspections of foreign farms and food processing plants.

The farm in Ojos Negros, Mexico, that was the source of the 2003 green onion contamination had never been inspected by U.S. authorities before the incident. And the FDA inspection that took place soon after the outbreak makes for chilling reading.

In their report, filed in December 2003, agency inspectors said they observed dirty runoff from the farm workers' windowless, mud-floored shacks and crude showers seeping directly onto fields where produce was grown. Photos of the site "show evidence of soiled diapers, soiled feminine hygiene products, and domestic waste" lying nearby, according to the report.

The growing fields were irrigated with water from a pond that was also a dumping ground for human sewage and animal manure. During processing, green onions typically passed through the hands of at least six workers, the FDA team said, and there was no evidence that workers were allowed time off for illness. While the firm purported to wash all onions in chlorinated water, it could produce no evidence to back that claim.

The Problem With China

The Chi-Chi's outbreak has been just one of many, and, in 2007, the focus shifted from Mexico to China.