Pressure Rises to Create Just 1 Food Safety Agency

With the threat of bioterrorism looming, the federal government is under pressure to overhaul the nation’s fragmented food safety and inspection systems.

“Under the current structure, we believe that there are very real doubts about the system’s ability to detect and quickly respond” to an organized bioterrorist attack, said Robert Robinson of the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, in testimony given to a Senate subcommittee hearing this week.

Both the GAO and Senate Democrats have renewed their push for a single food safety agency. Currently, oversight is divided among a handful of agencies, most notably the Department of Agriculture, which monitors meat and produce, and the Food and Drug Administration, which has oversight for processed food.

This divided responsibility has led to overlapping jurisdictions and a lack of accountability, says Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.). That could affect the government’s ability to respond quickly to protect consumers after an act of bioterrorism.

“Fragmentation is a burden that must be changed to protect the public health,” said Durbin, who introduced his Safe Food Act last week, seeking to roll all food safety inspection personnel into a single agency.

Bioterrorism hasn’t resulted in any recent food contamination, government and food industry officials stress. But recent acts of terrorism have the industry enacting extra precautions, such as closing plants to the public, putting tamper-detecting seals on shipments and fencing off loading docks and other sensitive areas, analysts say.

House and Senate Democrats have been taking steps to ensure greater monitoring of the food supply, introducing legislation to secure more funding for inspection and to broaden the authority of the Health and Human Services department to recall and ban contaminated imports and ban shipment of fruit from countries suspected of supporting or harboring terrorists.

The FDA has just 150 inspectors working the nation’s ports, which means that less than 1% of all imported food is inspected.

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Times wire services contributed to this report.