One of the most serious problems facing government officials involved with protecting the safety of Americans' foods is the dramatic increase in the amount of food products imported from countries around the world. As numerous studies have shown, federal and state agencies have done a remarkable job of ensuring the safety of domestically grown food, no mater the type of food, its origin, or its manner of preparation. But as of the early 21st century, the rapidly increasing globalization of the food industry has added yet another level of complexity to the process of ensuring food safety. Today, virtually any food grown or raised anywhere in the world can be made available for sale anywhere else in the world. Instead of getting strawberries from the farm next door or a farm in Arizona, for instance, Americans now purchase strawberries grown almost exclusively in some foreign country, usually Mexico. Ensuring the safety of imported food products at a level equivalent to that established for domestic products has become a real challenge for American health officials.
The FDA estimated in a 2003 report that the United States now imports food from at least 100 different countries. Imports make up at least 10 percent of all the food Americans eat, and for some commodities such as fresh fruits and vegetables that number is more than 40 percent. These numbers have risen rapidly in the past few decades as food distribution has become a globalized business, much as other types of businesses have. The FDA report said that the number of food entries to the United States from other nations had doubled between 1996 and 2003, and it projected that the rate of increase would continue to grow even more rapidly. It estimated an increase of 30 percent in the importation of foods in fiscal year 2002.
One of the fundamental problems in monitoring the safety of imported food products is that other nations do not always have the financial, technical, political, and other frameworks necessary to maintain a food safety system comparable to that of the United States. So food shipped to the United States is inherently more likely to be contaminated than that coming from domestic sources. Adding to this problem are international trade agreements that require one country to accept the imports of another country as essentially equivalent in safety to their domestic counterparts.
Such trade agreements are proliferating. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), for example, contains an equivalency provision. The treaty's three signatories, Canada, the United States, and Mexico, have all agreed to accept the food inspection systems in place in the three nations as equivalent to one another. NAFTA essentially ignores issues of food safety. It establishes no minimum food safety standards and does not require member nations to have any such standards. It relies instead on each nation's voluntary efforts to ensure the safety of the foods it produces.
Agreements developed within the context of the World Trade Organization (WTO) have similar problems. According to some studies, the United States has imported foods from other nations that do not meet U.S. domestic safety standards as a result of the principle of equivalency of food inspection systems among all signatories to WTO trade agreements. The Global Trade Watch project of Public Citizen (a nonprofit consumer advocacy group), for example, found that some of the 4 billion pounds of meat and poultry products imported under WTO trade agreements from Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, and Mexico in 2002 did not meet U.S. food safety standards.
The lack of satisfactory inspections of imported foods is a matter of some dispute. Data do suggest, however, that such foods have been responsible for a number of outbreaks of food-borne disease in the United States and elsewhere over the past two decades. For example, in 1997, nearly two dozen outbreaks of the food-borne disease cyclosporiasis were reported in eight states (California, Florida,
Maryland, Nebraska, Nevada, New York, Rhode Island, and Texas) and one Canadian province (Ontario). Over a two-month period, more than 500 confirmed and suspected cases of the disease were traced to the ingestion of raspberries apparently imported from Guatemala. The previous year, a similar series of outbreaks had taken place in which more than 1,000 cases of the disease had been reported. Although the precise source of contamination was never determined, investigators suspected that the raspberries had been sprayed with an insecticide or fungicide made with impure water.
Even individuals who try to eat a completely healthy diet cannot be sure that the foods they ingest will be totally safe. In 1995, for example, an outbreak of illnesses caused by the bacterium Salmonella Stanley in 17 U.S. states and Finland was traced to alfalfa sprouts imported from the Netherlands. While just 242 cases were identified in the two nations, extrapolating from usual reporting patterns, experts estimated that between 5,000 and 24,000 individuals had actually been infected by the bacterium. The 1995 incident was only the most recent in which bacterial contamination of sprouts led to outbreaks of food-borne illnesses in Canada, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The table on pages 155-156 summarizes some other outbreaks of food-borne illnesses in the United States that have been traced to foods imported from other nations.
U.S. agencies responsible for food safety attempt to deal with the imports problem in a variety of ways. For example, they often establish agreements with countries that export food to the United States allowing U.S. officials to inspect the food safety systems of those countries. The FDA conducted the first of these food safety audits in 1998, when inspectors monitored systems in Honduras and Trinidad and Tobago. In 1999, food safety programs in four more nations—Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua—were audited. The FDA suspended inspections of foreign food safety systems in 2000, however, when the agency had to redirect its resources to other international programs.
Federal agencies also monitor imported foods by inspecting food arrivals at American ports. The problem is that the volume of imported food is so large that only a small fraction is ever inspected,
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< SELECTED EXAMPLES OF FOOD-BORNE ILLNESS OUTBREAKS IN THE UNITED STATES (continued) > |
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|
YEAR |
PATHOGEN |
FOOD VEHICLE |
NUMBER OF CASES (CONFIRMED) |
ORIGIN OF COMMODITY |
|
1996 |
E. coli 0157:H 7 |
Lettuce |
27 |
Australia |
|
1997 |
hepatitis A virus |
Strawberries |
270 |
Mexico |
|
1997 |
Cyclospora |
Raspberries |
1,012 |
Guatemala |
|
1997 |
Salmonella saphra |
Cantaloupe |
24 |
Mexico |
|
1998 |
Shigella sonnei |
Parsley |
342 |
Mexico |
|
1999 |
Salmonella |
Mango |
72 |
Brazil |
|
Source: Adapted from data in Food Safety Network for May 11,1998 (131.104.232.9/fsnet/1998/5-1998/fs-05-11-98-01.txt) and other sources. |
no more than about 2 percent of all food imports. The USDA, FDA, and other agencies try to make these inspections more efficient by focusing on foods and nations that appear to be especially likely sources of contaminated imports. As the volume of imported foods increases, so does the need for inspectors. In 2002, for example, the FDA hired 300 new inspectors to monitor food imports, doubling the number of examinations conducted from 12,000 in 2001 to 24,000 in 2002. It doubled that number again in 2003, conducting 48,000 inspections, but made no further increases in 2004.
The problem of foreign food safety increased exponentially after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. American officials became suddenly and keenly aware of the many different ways that terrorists could attack Americans. One of the most obvious would be to intentionally contaminate foods shipped to the United States with a pathogen that could produce a widespread epidemic. In response to this possibility, the U.S. Congress passed the Public Health Security and Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Act of 2002 (the Bioterrorism Act), which President Bush signed into law on June 12, 2002. Title III of that act deals with protection of the nation's food system, especially the monitoring of foods imported from other nations. Agencies already responsible for monitoring food safety, such as the USDA and FDA, were instructed to expand their activities to improve their regulation of foods being brought into the country.
For example, the FDA was charged with overseeing the safety of food shipments into the United States. In response, the agency developed a program known as Prior Notice of Imported Food Shipments (PNIFS). Under this program, companies that intend to ship foods into the United States must first notify the FDA of their intent and provide detailed information about the nature of the food shipment. The FDA uses this information before the food's arrival to determine whether to inspect the imported food. The new PNIFS system went into effect on December 12, 2003.
Problems of guaranteeing the safety of imported foods are likely to grow in the future. As globalization of the food industry continues to grow, a large fraction of the food Americans eat will continue to come from virtually every nation in the world. Maintaining safety comparable to U.S. standards for these foods will be a challenge. Ongoing threats of bioterrorism will also remain a concern for the foreseeable future. Based on the nation's experience of the past decade, existing programs appear to be adequate to meet those challenges, provided that the federal government continues to provide the funds necessary to allow them to operate at maximum efficiency.
Introduction
The History Of Food Modification
Food Additives
Synthetic Foods
