Pesticides

In response to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) activities to protect the public from exposure to illegal pesticide residues in the domestic food supply under the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, specifically its: (1) monitoring of the nation's domestic food supply for illegal residues; and (2) efforts to prevent food containing illegal residues from reaching the market.

GAO noted that, since FDA could not monitor all food that might contain illegal pesticide residues, it designed its monitoring program to selectively spot-check a very small amount of domestically produced food and remove food that it found to contain illegal residues. GAO found that the FDA pesticide monitoring program has two major shortcomings because FDA does not: (1) regularly test food for a large number of pesticides that might be present in food, including a number of pesticides that, according to FDA, require continuous or periodic monitoring because they are known as potential health hazards and are likely to be used; (2) prevent the marketing of most of the food that contains illegal pesticide residues; and (3) penalize growers who market food with illegal pesticide residues when FDA is unable to remove it from the market.

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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