FDA: Food Industry Must Police Itself

With all the budget cuts the FDA has had especially during the Bush administration, especially in the food monitoring side, the FDA is now saying that the food industry, will have to police itself, including those importing the cheapest possibly products from overseas.

You know we are all supposed to police ourselves and the real police just show up after we fail to, but with the food industry it's different.  After, spinach sickened dozens of people and killed many, no police showed up to take those responsible for the tragedy to jail.  Instead inspectors came to look around and tut and moan, but no one was forced to take real responsibility.  

And in the pet food crisis we see that the FDA won't out the companies that won't admit to passing on melamine in their pet food.  

And reading the Washington Post article "FDA Was Aware of Dangers To Food" notice the extremely soft kid gloves that the Bus administration's FDA has used after Con-Agra's peanut butter was responsible for a salmonella outbreak (most of that is on the second page, of course).

When food companies see that nothing bad happens to those who pass on tainted food, then this is just going to get worse. 

And let me crib a bit here from the Post article:

According to Caroline Smith DeWaal, who heads the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a consumer-advocacy group, "When budgets are tight . . . the food program at FDA gets hit the hardest."

In next year's budget, passed amid discovery of contamination problems in spinach, tomatoes and lettuce, Congress has voted the FDA a $10 million increase to improve food safety, DeWaal said. The Agriculture Department, which monitors meat, poultry and eggs and keeps inspectors in every processing plant, got an increase 10 times that amount to help pay for its inspection programs. The FDA visits problem food plants about once a year and the rest far less frequently, Brackett said.

William Hubbard, who retired as associate commissioner of the FDA in 2005 and founded the advocacy group Coalition for a Stronger FDA, said that when he joined the agency in the 1970s, its food safety arm claimed half its budget and personnel.

"Now it's about a quarter . . . at a time in which the problems have grown, the size of the industry has grown and imports of food have skyrocketed," Hubbard said. 

tags: fda  food industry  pet food crisis  peanut butter salmonella  

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