U.S. Food Safety: A Shopping List of Solutions

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Still, the agency's critics say the FDA would only gain from more funding and from broader powers to monitor foods from abroad.

The third, and least radical, alternative for improving oversight of imported foods: Give the agency recall authority. The FDA routinely recalls bad drugs from the market, but it has no such jurisdiction over bad food -- with the exception of infant formula.

"Now, if you're some little firm in China, and you know that there is no mandatory [FDA] recall authority, odds are you aren't going to get caught, so you can dump your less standard products in the U.S. with little recourse to who's going to track them down or enforce it," Milano said.

U.S. Inspectors Defend Their Performance

All three recommendations -- as well as others, such as country-of-origin labeling and instituting so-called equivalency standards that would demand that imported foods be as safe as domestic products -- are already making their way through Congress as part of a bill introduced by Rep. John Dingell, a Michigan Democrat and chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee.

The bill would also limit the number of U.S. ports that foreign foods could enter to only those equipped with FDA laboratories to help cut down on so-called "port-shopping," where importers move shoddy products from one port to the next, hoping to eventually slip the product by inspectors.

For their part, federal inspectors say they're up to the challenges of monitoring food imports.

Rogers, whose office oversees the inspection of imported goods, said his agency "is doing an excellent job, given our resource challenges."

"Certainly, I will concede that an agency with more can do more," Rogers said. But more inspections are "not the panacea for total public health protection," he added. "There are opportunities to interact with foreign governments, opportunities to collaborate with the states, to interact with those other agencies that have overlapping responsibilities -- it's all part of a network."

Raymond added that USDA teams are already working with officials at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and Customs and Border Control on a computerized system that should boost the detection of hazardous imported goods.

As for granting the FDA recall authority, Rogers said it may not be necessary. Products made by foreign firms that resist FDA oversight are quickly targeted by the agency for inspection at the border, he noted. In that sense, "an inspection dictates whether or not a firm will have access to the U.S. market," he said.

Efforts to boost the safety of imported food will also hinge on global partnerships.

A case in point: In October, FDA Commissioner Dr. Andrew von Eschenbach and others met with their Chinese counterparts to discuss import safety. In December, the two countries signed an agreement that places new registration and inspection requirements on 10 food products exported by Chinese companies. Those products include some preserved foods, pet foods and farm-raised fish, all of which have been suspected of being tainted.

Despite continuing reports of food recalls and contaminations, the United States still has the safest food supply in the world, von Eschenbach stressed.

"But we realize the world is changing," von Eschenbach acknowledged during a November 2007 teleconference after the FDA presented its Food Protection Plan to the White House. "There was a time when we produced the food ourselves. Now we've noticed that much of this food comes to us 365 days a year, because it is being produced in other parts of the world.

"Globalization has radically changed our food supply and our food-supply chain," von Eschenbach added. And that means, he said, that the FDA needs to catch up with those changes.