Food Safety

Outbreaks of foodborne illnesses have raised questions about the safety of the U.S. food supply and the inherent weaknesses in the fragmented federal food safety system. For example, the Department of Agriculture's Food Safety Service has jurisdiction over the safety of meat, poultry, and some egg products, while the Food and Drug Administration regulates all other foods. GAO and the National Academy of Sciences have recommended consolidating food safety responsibilities. Last year, the Academy recommended several approaches, including a single food safety agency. This report reviews the experiences of four countries--Canada, Denmark, Great Britain, and Ireland--that are consolidating their food safety systems. GAO (1) examines the reasons for and approaches taken to consolidation, the costs and savings associated with consolidation, and efforts to assess the effectiveness of the revised food safety systems and (2) identifies lessons that the United States might learn from these countries' experiences.

GAO noted that: (1) the reasons the four countries have consolidated, or are in the process of consolidating, their organizational responsibilities for food safety activities differed, as did the approaches they took; (2) however, all four countries had similar views regarding the costs and benefits of consolidation and the need to evaluate their consolidation efforts; (3) in deciding to consolidate food safety responsibilities, two of the countries--Great Britain and Ireland--were responding to public concerns about the safety of their food supplies and chose to consolidate responsibilities in the agencies that report to their ministers of health; (4) the other two countries--Canada and Denmark--were more concerned about program effectiveness and cost savings and consolidated activities in agencies that report to their ministers of agriculture, who already control most of the food safety resources; (5) all four countries are incurring short-term start-up costs in establishing their new agencies but are expecting long-term benefits in terms of money saved, more food safety for the money spent, and better assurance of food safety; (6) none of the countries had developed performance measures and data early in the consolidation process to assess the effectiveness of their new systems; (7) foreign officials identified several common lessons from their experiences that they believe could be broadly applicable to any U.S. consolidation effort; (8) in all four countries, a consensus had to be developed on the need to consolidate food safety responsibilities; (9) certain management initiatives were needed to establish any new agency; (10) adequate funding for start-up costs was also necessary; (11) furthermore, to help ensure the new agencies' early success, critical operational concerns, such as having the flexibility to shift program resources to the highest food safety priorities, establishing a common organizational culture, and ensuring openness in the decisionmaking process, were important factors that had to be addressed; and (12) evaluation criteria and mechanisms need to be established early in the process in order to assess the new agency's performance.