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

(Page 5)

The pet food scandal, as well as a stream of toy and other recalls in 2007, spurred negotiations between U.S. officials and their counterparts in China, which exported $4.2 billion worth of food to America last year -- much of it in the form of ubiquitous processed food ingredients such as wheat gluten or ascorbic acid.

While no major outbreaks of human foodborne illness tied to Chinese products have occurred recently, they're not unlikely in the future, Hubbard said. Much of the food in China that's destined for U.S. dinner tables is grown and processed by mom-and-pop producers with little or no oversight, he said.

"What they've got is this vast cottage industry of producers making this stuff. Sometimes you might have a producer making just five or six sacks of flour per week in the hinterlands of China," Hubbard said. "China experts tell me that the central government in Beijing has very little influence out in the countryside where this is made."

China has reacted recently to international pressure by signaling that it is ready to tighten food safety standards. In December, the United States and China signed an agreement that places new registration and inspection requirements on 10 food products exported by Chinese companies. The products include some preserved foods, pet foods and farm-raised fish, all of which have come under suspicion of being tainted.

Those types of market reactions may help fix things in countries of origin such as China, experts say, but weaknesses remain here at home.

Topping the list: a chronic underfunding of FDA inspection services, according to critics. "If you look at the Bush Administration's fiscal year 2007 budget proposal, the Produce Safety and other food programs are going to be cut by $22.6 million from 2006 levels, and the staffing would be reduced by 105 full-time employees," Doyle noted.

One private industry food safety inspector, Ed Sherwin, said he doesn't blame management or workers at the FDA for what he considers to be poor oversight of imported foods.

"What I've found is that the federal inspectors from FDA and USDA are excellent in their work, but they are understaffed and overworked," Sherwin testified at a special Congressional hearing on the issue in October. In the meantime, "profits take priority over food safety," Sherwin said. "Food service operators tend to rely on their suppliers to provide the products that best meet their needs at the lowest price. Operators don't care if the crabmeat is from Maryland or Malaysia, the grapes are from California or Chile."

Lack of 'Traceability'

Inspections at the border and ports of entry can help spot trouble, but experts say the FDA currently has full-time inspectors in place at just 90 of the nation's 300 import points of entry.

Then there's what's known as "port shopping," where shoddy goods are moved from one port to the next until they can be slipped past inspectors.

"Importers know that if FDA only looks at 1 percent, then even if they get caught at port A, chances are they won't get caught at port B," Hubbard explained. "Or they'll sometimes use things like inland ports for seafood. Shippers will enter their food through Las Vegas, where's there's no [FDA] seafood person, because it's an inland port."

Testifying at the congressional hearing, Caroline DeWaal, of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, said imported food is often hard to track once it gets by port inspectors. "For example, with produce, it can all go into the same warehouse," she said. As part of normal distribution, she added, "they can mix boxes, and produce from several different countries can be reshipped out again without any kind of labeling."

This lack of "traceability" can make it tough to uncover the source of an outbreak and can cause worried consumers to avoid all brands of a given food, severely affecting an entire industry.

That scenario unfolded in the early days of the 2006 U.S. spinach scare, experts noted, with consumers simply avoiding the leafy green altogether, regardless of where it was grown.

Finally, there's the problem of what everyone calls the FDA's lack of clout in punishing companies that import dangerous foods. The agency is allowed by law to recall dangerous pharmaceuticals, but it has no such power over potentially deadly foods. The new Food Protection Plan does include a provision calling for mandatory recall authority, but it remains to be seen if legislators will grant the agency those new powers.

Moves toward more thorough and frequent inspections offer little comfort to food-poisoning victims such as Miller, who reached an out-of-court settlement of his lawsuit against Chi-Chi's before the company went out of business in the United States in 2004.

Miller said his story should remind Americans just how close the link is between what's on their forks and what's in fields thousands of miles away.

"Disease knows no boundaries," he said. "I know that we are still going to have outbreaks -- nothing is perfect, and you can't stop everything. But we have to lessen it, and lessen its impact."

NEXT: Can Food Safety Problems Be Solved?