Food Safety

The U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Pesticide Data Program is not providing pesticide residue data needed to make key regulatory decisions on ensuring food safety. Although the program's ongoing pesticide usage surveys are generally satisfying interagency users, residue data collection has had major problems. USDA originally intended to start providing residue data to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on 22 food commodities and 16 pesticides in July 1991. As of January 1992, however, USDA had not provided any data because it has only assembled partial results on seven commodities and eight pesticides. More importantly, USDA's data are not statistically reliable and will therefore be of limited use to EPA in making upcoming decisions on pesticide safety in food products. Despite its lack of a statistically reliable sampling approach, USDA plans to spend $24 million to collect residue data in fiscal years 1991 and 1992. Further, the absence of agreements with EPA and FDA on the direction of the program means that USDA risks spending money without knowing whether the program is actually improving food safety. At the conclusion of GAO's review, USDA officials said that they were trying to obtain signed agreements with the two agencies. The program's problems are magnified by the absence of an information management strategy.

GAO found that: (1) USDA launched the Coordinated Pesticide Data Program to provide better pesticide data that would be beneficial to it, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in their regulatory responsibilities; (2) the program's key objectives are to collect comprehensive, statistically valid, and scientifically based pesticide usage and residue data and to provide EPA with data it can use in making pesticide reregistration decisions; (3) USDA components plan to collect pesticide usage and residue data for fruit and vegetable crops from several states; (4) USDA pesticide usage surveys are proceeding on schedule, and EPA and FDA have expressed satisfaction with the resulting data; (5) USDA pesticide residue data collection efforts are behind schedule, have been significantly reduced in scope from original plans, and will not yield statistically reliable results; (6) USDA underestimated the complexities in planning and implementing activities and requirements for sampling methods, laboratory testing, and quality assurance; (7) USDA, EPA, and FDA lack an agreement as to program direction and assessment; and (8) USDA has not developed a strategy to determine whether available computer resources can adequately process or disseminate the data collected, and system requirements remain largely undefined.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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