U.S.-Canadian Food Safety

The United States and Canada are long-standing trading partners, and both import large amounts of food from other countries. The two countries have also established similar systems to guarantee the safety of imported foods. Recent international trade agreements, such as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and the North American Free Trade Agreement, are smoothing the way for increased trade in foods. GAO and Canada's Office of the Auditor General undertook a concurrent review to examine how the United States and Canada share information on and coordinate activities for shipments of unsafe foods and foreign food-processing plants. The Canadian report, entitled Federal Management of the Food Safety System: Concurrent Review of Third-Country Food Imports, accompanies this report. The joint survey concludes that although Canadian and U.S. agencies share information about food safety on an informal and ad hoc basis, a more comprehensive system for sharing information about food shipments and inspection of foreign food processing facilities would help both countries better target food safety resources.

GAO found that: (1) U.S. and Canadian food safety officials share information through generally informal agency-to-agency exchanges and cross-border contacts at ports of entry; (2) U.S.-Canadian information sharing efforts focus primarily on shipments of potentially unsafe foods, food shipments refused at one port of entry that may be rerouted to the other port, and inspections of foreign food-processing plants; (3) opportunities exist for the United States and Canada to develop a more comprehensive system for sharing information about shipments of unsafe foods and inspections of foreign food-processing plants and for coordinating these inspections; and (4) improvements in U.S. and Canadian information sharing efforts would enable the two nations to better target their limited inspection resources.

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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