Pull Together Food Safety Agencies

Recent food scares--including the surprise appearance in taco shells of genetically modified corn not approved for human consumption, the reappearance of “mad cow disease” in Europe and an outbreak of E. coli last week in ground beef sold in the upper Midwest--are leading even food industry officials to call for improved government regulation.

The most sensible of the reforms now being debated in Washington would consolidate food oversight, now scattered among several federal agencies, under a single food safety agency.

When the National Academy of Sciences recommended creating a single food safety agency in 1998, the Clinton administration ducked the issue. However, last week Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman said his department’s food safety panel may soon call for such an agency. Glickman admitted that the corn debacle has shown that “there is an awful lot of uncertainty between agencies’ respective regulatory authorities on what to do.”

That’s putting it mildly. Currently, food oversight is scattered over a maze of six federal agencies so inscrutable that even the inspectors themselves often don’t know who’s in charge. The Agriculture Department does some of it, the Food and Drug Administration does some; even the Commerce Department and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have some responsibility for fish inspection. No fewer than four federal agencies are responsible for carrying out one narrow mission: ensuring that grains for animal food do not get mixed up with grains for human food--as they did in the taco shells--and that the meat and bone meal fed to livestock do not contain tissue that could transmit mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy.

U.S. food is still among the world’s safest, and there’s no evidence that genetically modified corn has harmed humans or that mad cow disease has reached any U.S. consumers.

Still, the recent food scares underscore the need for better regulation. The E. coli outbreak, which may have originated in a food processing plant, highlights the problems with federal meat inspection policies, which require tests for E. coli in slaughterhouses but not in meat processing plants. The corn mix-up shows why the government should require safety reviews for genetically modified foods, as the biotechnology industry itself urged last week. And the resurgence of mad cow disease in Europe underscores the need to develop a governmentwide strategy for monitoring that disease within and outside the United States, as the Government Accounting Office recommended in September.

Scientists say that better methods for testing cattle are needed--current tests are slow and can be done only on dead cattle--and there remain many questions about the disease’s origin, cause and transmission.

The apparent discovery of a variant of mad cow disease in an imported sheep herd in Vermont has led to a court battle between the Agriculture Department, which wants to destroy 355 sheep in the herd, and local farmers, who say the sheep may only have scrapie, an affliction with similarities to mad cow but not thought to harm human beings.

Food safety reforms can be successfully coordinated only by a single food safety agency. With the increasing movement of feed and animals across borders because of free trade, the increasing use of genetically modified ingredients and heightened consumer fears following health scares, the time to create such an agency has arrived.