Clinton Urges Laws on Safety of Food Imports

Responding to recent scares about tainted imported berries, President Clinton on Thursday asked Congress to pass legislation requiring that imported fruits and vegetables meet the same safety standards as home-grown crops.

The president also announced plans to expand the Food and Drug Administration’s international food inspection force in 1999 to help prevent tainted produce from ending up in American meals.

“I hope it doesn’t complicate the trade environment,” Clinton said as he detailed his plan in the White House Rose Garden. “But . . . it seems to me that we have no higher responsibility than to protect the health and safety of our citizens. . . . I’m not interested in trade in things that will make the American people sick.”

In a move to ensure the safety of domestically grown produce, Clinton’s proposal also directs the FDA and the Department of Health and Human Services to work with the U.S. agriculture community during the next year to develop voluntary standards for growing, processing, shipping and selling fruit and vegetables.

The guidelines--which would be the first such standards for the nation--could have a particularly big impact in California, where more than half of the nation’s produce and nuts are grown.

The pressure for the federal government to ensure the safety of imported produce has grown as foreign fruits and vegetables account for an increasing share of the U.S. market, in part because of freer trade and the global economy. Currently, 10% of the vegetables and 30% of the fruit sold in this country are grown abroad.

Food safety advocates in Congress immediately blasted the president’s proposal, saying that it does not go far enough. They charged that the president’s action is aimed at winning votes for a measure working its way through Congress that would give him “fast-track” authority to negotiate trade agreements. Under the legislation, trade pacts that the president sends to Congress could not be amended before they are approved or rejected.

“This is pure cosmetics to get fast-track passed by Congress,” Rep. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) said in a telephone interview from Mexico, where he was inspecting the quality of food being shipped to America. “This is clearly not going to work. This sort of modest, inadequate approach will swing absolutely zero votes in Congress.”

But White House spokesman Mike McCurry said that the president was motivated by concerns about recent food scares and not by a desire to win approval for his fast-track trade proposal. “I want to stress [that] the president does not see this as a trade issue,” McCurry said. “This is a public health issue.”

The president’s proposal met mixed reviews from consumer groups.

“While it’s a step forward, it’s not as far as we would like,” said Bruce Silverglade of the Center for Science and the Public Interest, an organization that pushes for food safety. The proposal comes after 179 schoolchildren in Michigan contracted hepatitis A in March from Mexican frozen strawberries and hundreds of Americans around the country two years in a row became ill after exposure to Guatemalan raspberries tainted with a parasite.

Trinidiad Paz Alvarez, an official with Mexico’s National Assn. of Farm Producers, said that the Clinton initiative is a response to political pressure from U.S. farmers who are feeling the heat from “the competitiveness of Mexican products.”

“It’s undeniable that there are groups pressuring not only politically but economically because we produce cheaper crops here,” said Alvarez, whose group includes some 62,000 growers and food processors, mainly of beans, corn, wheat, sorghum and garbanzo beans.

Under the president’s plan, which is not expected to go to Congress until next year, the federal government would have new authority to ban the import of fruits and vegetables from countries that refuse to allow U.S. inspectors to check their fields for sanitary conditions and water purity, among other things. Administration officials said the cost of beefing up such inspections would be about $24 million, double current expenditures.

Clinton’s proposal was unveiled just a few days after 84 House Democrats sent a letter to him urging renegotiating of some food-safety provisions of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which has increased the flow of produce from Mexico. The letter also asked that any new trade accords negotiated under fast-track authority include tougher food-safety protections.

The authors of the letter said Clinton’s proposal does not go nearly far enough in meeting their demands. Particularly, it does not include a requirement that all food stuffs be labeled with their country of origin.

“At least he’s responding . . . but it’s way short of what we asked for,” Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) said. “It doesn’t change my mind [about fast-track] and I don’t think it’s going to change many minds in Congress.”

Responding to Clinton’s call for voluntary safety standards for domestically grown produce, officials of the Western Growers Assn., whose members produce more than 54% of the nation’s fresh produce, stressed that the growers and packers of fruits and vegetables in California and Arizona already meet high standards. But association President David Moore said the growers “believe that they can do better.”

The association adopted new voluntary safety standards in August for its members, Moore said.

Farmers in California and elsewhere stressed that Americans should not take the president’s proposal as evidence that there is a problem.

“Instances of food safety problems in the U.S. are rare,” said Bob Vice, president of the California Farm Bureau. “People should be careful before drawing any hard and fast conclusions from recent food safety scares. The fact is our food safety system works.”

Times staff writer Chris Kraul in Mexico City contributed to this story.