Food Safety

In response to continuing outbreaks of food poisoning, Congress and federal agencies are considering new approaches to ensuring food safety. This report discusses the federal food safety system, particularly the current responsibilities, budgets, staffing, and workloads of the federal agencies involved and the changes in these areas since 1989, when GAO issued a two-volume report on this subject (GAO/RCED-91-19A and 19B). The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS), the lead agencies responsible for food safety, now rely heavily on physical inspections to prevent unsafe food from leaving processing plants. Current proposals, however, would shift the government's oversight role. Private industry would become responsible for identifying and controlling potential hazards before they affected food products, while the government would assess the effectiveness of each plant's safety system. Such systems, known as Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point systems, are intended to identify the critical points in food processing and establish controls to prevent adulteration caused by microbes, chemicals, or physical hazards. Under the FDA and FSIS initiatives, such systems are to be up and running by 1997. Because of FDA's resources constraints and FSIS' regulatory restrictions, however, the agencies are unlikely to inspect plants on the basis of the risk they pose--even though this was recommended by the National Academy of Sciences.

GAO found that: (1) the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) are primarily responsible for regulating food safety; (2) both agencies inspect meat, poultry, and seafood plants, but are constrained by resource limitations; (3) FDA plans to inspect each food processing plant once every 8 years, or once every 5 years when it can use state inspection resources; (4) Congress has increased the mandates of both agencies since 1989, including requiring FDA and FSIS to help develop and oversee new food labelling requirements; (5) while the agencies' budgets have increased, their staffing remained constant; (6) FDA, FSIS, and the National Marine Fisheries Service, which maintains a voluntary seafood inspection program, are implementing hazard analysis and critical control point (HACCP) programs, which emphasize the detection and prevention of microbial contamination and increase the role of industry in ensuring food safety; and (7) HACCP initiatives represent a fundamental shift in the government's approach to ensuring food safety.