FDA Pesticide Tests on Food Imports Called ‘Inadequate’

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is not doing enough to protect American consumers from pesticide-tainted imported foods, according to a U.S. General Accounting Office review scheduled for release today.

The study, outlined Tuesday by U.S. Sen. Pete Wilson (R-Calif.) in a speech here before the Rice Growers Assn. of California, found that the FDA tests less than 1% of imported food shipments for pesticides and that more than half of the pesticides in use worldwide are not detectable by the agency’s testing procedures.

Even when illegal amounts of pesticides are found, the FDA is able to keep the tainted fresh fruits and vegetables off the market in only 45% of the cases and has in most instances failed to impose penalties on importers of the products, the study concluded.

“Fairness for the consumer and the American farmer demand that there be much more stringent enforcement of existing law,” Wilson said.

Charging that the FDA was “guilty of neglect,” Wilson complained that even when importers have been told to hold up distribution “they have gone right ahead and distributed foodstuffs that were in fact tainted.”

The food and drug agency, he said, is “not adequately funded. There is grossly inadequate sampling (of imported foods), grossly inadequate inspection, and even when (FDA officials) find people who violate their own clear requirements, they have only rarely enforced any penalty against them.”

He told the growers that he is working with Rep. Frank Horton (D-N.Y.) to amend U.S. pesticide laws so that “those who are going to grow foodstuffs and then export them to the United States will be subject to exactly the same standards that you are.” Among the options he said he is considering is the placing of U.S. government inspectors in foreign countries to check on pesticide practices.

A Wilson aide added that new legislation might also require the FDA to collect penalties whenever officials determine that pesticide levels in imported food exceed U.S. standards. The Government Accounting Office study found that federal food and drug officials declined to seek damages against importers in 52 of 73 cases where illegal amounts of pesticides were discovered.

In Washington, FDA spokesman Jim Greene said agency officials have not yet seen the Government Accounting Office report. However, he noted that a similar report by a congressional subcommittee in 1979 resulted in a complete overhaul of the agency’s pesticide monitoring. “We made some major corrections of deficiencies that were pointed out in 1979,” Greene said.

“If we have cause to believe a sample violates our standards, we will hold up a shipment from distribution,” he said.

Although Horton was scheduled to release the complete study today, Wilson released an official summary of the report. Among the findings:

- Food and drug officials sampled less than 1% of about 1 million imported food shipments each year, leaving the decision on when to test products to individual inspectors who have inadequate knowledge of foreign patterns of pesticide use.

- Of 33,687 imported food samples tested between 1979 and 1985, the FDA found 2,056, or 6.1%, had levels of pesticides that exceeded U.S. standards. However, the Government Accounting Office investigators urged that the FDA change its practice of concentrating its tests on high-volume imports, which generally have good records of compliance with pesticide standards, and instead test a wider range of imported foods.

- Tests used by the Food and Drug Agency are capable of detecting only 203 different pesticides--less than half the number employed worldwide. Normally, the regulators test for even fewer pesticides.

- Even when foods that violate U.S. standards are identified, food and drug inspectors working with customs officials are often unable to prevent their distribution. The Government Accounting Office investigators found that of 164 adulterated products, 73 were not recovered and “are presumed to have been consumed by the public.” Food and drug officials recommended against collecting damages in 52 of those 73 cases, and penalties were actually collected in only eight instances.