Food Safety

Federal agencies cannot ensure that the growing volume of imported foods is safe for consumers. The Food Safety and Inspection Service, which has jurisdiction over meat, poultry, and some egg products, places the burden for safety on the exporting countries by allowing imports only from those countries with food safety systems that it deems to be equivalent to the U.S. system. In contrast, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which regulates all other foods, lacks such legal authority. As a result, it allows food imports from almost any country and takes on the burden of ensuring the safety of imported foods as they arrive at U.S. ports of entry. Port-of-entry inspections are ineffective, however, because (1) this approach does not guarantee that foods are produced under adequately controlled conditions; (2) FDA currently inspects less than two percent of all foreign shipments; and (3) inspections will not detect some organisms, such as cyclospora. In addition, GAO questions whether the Food Safety and Inspection Service and FDA are targeting their inspection resources at those imported foods posing the greatest safety risks. Moreover, FDA's procedures for ensuring that unsafe imported foods do not reach U.S. consumers are vulnerable to abuse by unscrupulous importers.

GAO noted that: (1) FDA lacks the legal authority to require that countries exporting foods to the United States have food safety systems equivalent to U.S. systems, an authority that FSIS has and uses to share the burden of ensuring safe foods with the exporting countries; (2) without such authority, FDA must rely primarily on its port-of-entry inspections, which covered less than 2 percent of shipments in 1997, to detect and bar unsafe foods; (3) such an approach has been widely discredited as an effective protective measure; (4) both FDA and FSIS could make better use of their inspection resources by using available health risk information to target shipments for inspection that pose the highest food safety risk; (5) FDA could further improve the use of resources by clarifying its communications to inspectors about which shipments to select and by taking enforcement action when importers are found to inaccurately describe the contents of shipments; (6) with such improvements, FDA could better ensure that it is using its scarce resources to identify the foods posing greater risks; (7) FDA's procedures for ensuring that unsafe imported foods do not reach U.S. consumers are vulnerable to abuse by unscrupulous importers; (8) under current procedures, FDA generally allows importers to retain control over shipments until the agency grants their release; (9) if importers move shipments into domestic commerce without a FDA release, FDA has no effective means of compelling importers to return the shipments for inspection, destruction, or reexport; (10) when FDA requires an importer to provide evidence that a suspect shipment is safe, the agency allows the importer to select the laboratory that picks the samples to be tested and that conducts the tests; and (11) FDA's and Custom's principal deterrent for ensuring that importers comply with U.S. requirements is uneven and uncertain.