U.S. Food and Drug Administration inspectors made 13 visits to Fiji in
2007 for food inspections and no visits at all to China, according to a
study released to Congress recently by the Government Accountability
Office (GAO).
Fiji, the tiny but beautiful nation comprised of islands and atolls in
the Pacific Ocean, provided the U.S. with about $85 million worth of
seafood and shellfish last year and an almost equal amount of bottled
water, according to the U.S. Commerce Department.
China, which sends $250 billion more in food and goods to the United
States each year than the U.S. sends to it, shipped more than $800
million in fruits and frozen juice, $440 million in vegetables and over
$2 billion in seafood to the United States in 2007.
The two countries were among 150 nations where FDA inspectors have
traveled over the last six years, the GAO said. Between 2001 and 2007,
U.S. inspectors went to China 33 times and 23 times to Fiji, but no
inspections at all were made in China during 2006 and 2007.
Joseph Eifert, an associate professor of food safety at Virginia
Polytechnic Institute and State University and a former FDA inspector,
said the difference is likely attributable to the fact that in Fiji,
one of the top tourism destinations in the Pacific, the FDA inspectors
were welcome.
“China may not have welcomed FDA inspectors, or readily accepted
our help -- our ‘food safety guidance’ -- but probably
recent events regarding pet food and other items may have changed their
mind,” Eifert said.
In fact, sources at the FDA told Cybercast News Service that bilateral
talks, which were held in Beijing in March to establish a permanent FDA
presence in China, grew out of widely publicized scandals over the last
few years involving Chinese-produced drugs and products for the U.S.
market.
Those scandals ranged from tainted pet food to four deaths and hundreds
of adverse reactions from tainted components used in making the
anti-clotting drug heparin.
The two nations signed a “Memorandum of Agreement” in
December 2007 to place eight food and drug inspectors in three Chinese
cities – Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. In May 2008, during a
trip to China, Health and Human Service Secretary Michael Leavitt
pledged that those inspectors should be in place by the end of this
year.
HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt and FDA Commissioner Andrew von Eschenbach
The agreement with China, meanwhile, is part of a new initiative that
the Bush administration calls its Beyond our Borders Initiative.
"In an age when a border is not a barrier, the globalized economy
demands nothing less than heightened regulatory interoperability,
information exchange, and cooperation, especially on product quality
and enforcement matters," said Dr. Murray Lumpkin, deputy FDA
commissioner for International and Special Programs, in a statement to
Cybercast News Service.
Inspections beyond our borders
Sending U.S. inspectors to foreign nations like China and Fiji is nothing new but has become a bit more visible in recent years.
“The FDA has been sending people overseas for a long time, but
they are doing more of that recently,” Eifert told Cybercast News
Service.
All told, between 2001 and 2007, more than 1,100 FDA inspections have
been performed in over 150 countries, according to Lisa Shames,
director of the natural resources and environment group at the GAO.
“What FDA talks about is ‘developing a greater risk-based
approach’ -- in other words, going to those countries and to
those food facilities that are at highest risk for having potential
problems,” Shames told Cybercast News Service.
“We feel that they need to do that because it would be physically
impossible for them to visit every single institution,” she said.
“For them to visit every establishment in every country would
cost in the billions of dollars. So FDA really does need to develop the
criteria to determine what countries they would go to.”
The Top 10 list of nations where FDA inspectors have traveled (between
2001 and 2007) includes: Mexico (105 times), Ecuador (64), Chile (52),
Peru (50), Brazil (46), Thailand (46), Canada (38), China (33), Taiwan
(32) and India (30).
Serena Vinter, a senior research associate at the liberal health
activist group, Trust for America’s Health, said on the whole, 15
percent of the U.S. food supply comes from foreign firms.
“There are certain sectors where the percentage is much higher,
and one of those sectors is fresh fruits and vegetables – of
that, 60 percent is imported. For seafood it’s even higher, 75
percent is imported,” Vinter told Cybercast News Service.
At a time when the amount of imported food is on the rise and the
government has made foreign inspections a priority, the FDA actually
sent fewer inspectors in 2007 than in previous years.
“The number of inspections overseas has actually gone down
– from over 200 five years ago to less than 100 last year,”
Shames said.
Vinter said that is largely due to the fact that the FDA has a shortage
of inspectors, and Congress needs to appropriate more money to the
beleaguered agency.
On June 9, the Bush administration increased its Fiscal Year (FY) 2009
budget request for FDA by $275 million, for a total $404 million
– a nearly 18 percent increase over the previous year. Of that,
$125 million will be used for food safety and will allow the FDA to
intensify actions to implement its Food Protection Plan.
This is in addition to the extra $42.2 million proposed for food
protection in the budget announced in February 2008. In FY 2008, the
FDA asked for $10.6 million in additional funds to strengthen food
safety.
But still more money is needed, Vinter said, for FDA inspections to do an adequate job.
“You’re increasing their workload and cutting the number of
inspectors you have in the field to do the workload, so it’s a
double-edged sword,” Vinter told Cybercast News Service.
Peter Van Doren, a senior fellow of the libertarian Cato Institute,
meanwhile, said given that more foreign food is entering the United
States, it probably makes sense to send inspectors to other countries
“It also makes the job the FDA has now even more expensive and
more difficult,” Van Doren told Cybercast News Service.
“The FDA has estimated that domestic inspections cost an average
$8,000 and foreign ones cost $16,000 – presumably the difference
is airfare and hotels. Can we afford –are taxpayers willing to
pay for – what it would take to do a really good job?”
Van Doren suggested that the FDA should begin to look at some
“outside-the-box” free-market-based ideas that are being
generated by food producers themselves.
“It’s not that I think that everything is okay. It’s
just that I’m not sure the only answer is to give the FDA more
money,” Van Doren said.
The FDA is responsible for policing about 80 percent of the food supply.
