FDA Changes Approach to Food Safety Inspections

(Federal Times – Gregg Carlstrom)

Hoping to shore up sagging public confidence, the Food and Drug Administration has abandoned the use of random inspections to ensure food safety in favor of inspections targeted at high-risk production sites.

Under the new approach outlined this month, the agency will focus its attention on farms with poor safety records, importers with lower quality standards, and other at-risk food suppliers.

FDA has struggled with its image this year because of its sluggish response to a salmonella outbreak. It took months to find the source – peppers grown in Mexico – and several more weeks to find the farm that grew the peppers.

The new approach is the first step toward modernizing the inspection process, said Dr. David Acheson, FDA’s associate commissioner for foods. “We’re trying to make better use of the data we’ve got. Do we need more data? Probably,” Acheson said in an interview this month. “But it shouldn’t be: ‘Well, we don’t have enough data, so we’ll just do random inspections.’”

But critics say the agency doesn’t have enough data to know which farmers and distributors are high risk. The problem is particularly acute for imported food, they claim, because less than 1% of imported food is tested.

“How do they determine risks when they’re doing so little testing?” asked Patty Lovera, assistant director of Food and Water Watch, a nonprofit consumer advocate. “Only a fraction of the food ever sees a lab.”

Americans eat about 40% more imported food today than in 1995; the food is produced by more than 189,000 facilities. The growing volume of imports means FDA has little choice but to conduct risk-based inspections: It costs, on average, $16,700 to inspect a foreign facility, so the cost of inspecting each facility once – $ 3.2 billion – exceeds FDA’s annual budget.

The agency is trying to cut down those costs by opening field offices overseas. The first one, in China, opened last month; FDA planned to open two offices in India this month, but Acheson said the attacks in Mumbai will delay those openings. The foreign offices will lower the cost per inspection, but they will still tax the agency’s resources, according a Government Accountability Office report released earlier this year. Read more here.