Senate demands more from food safety plan

By Missy Ryan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Senators and food safety experts on Tuesday criticized the Bush administration's new blueprint for food safety, saying the proposed changes do not go far enough to repair a deeply dysfunctional system.

"The FDA's promise to protect American families is too often an empty one, because of the starvation budgets and absent leadership that FDA has endured in recent years," Sen. Edward Kennedy said in opening remarks.

Kennedy, chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, and fellow skeptical lawmakers had sharp questions for Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt, who oversees the Food and Drug Administration, as he defended last month's twin food and import safety plans.

They seemed reluctant to believe the Bush administration's new approach, the product of months of field visits and agency probes, would do enough to restore consumers' confidence after a wave of dangerous spinach, peanut butter and other goods.

Leavitt, waving a copy of the 68-page plan on import safety, repeated the administration's position that government alone cannot guarantee safe food in the modern economy.

"A change in strategy needs to occur. We can't just stand at the border and hope to catch things," he said.

He hopes for new government powers, like greater access to company records and new recall authorities, and promised to request larger budgets in the future.

The administration vision banks on private-sector cooperation, which would be largely voluntary, and new deals with foreign governments that would help prevent dangerous goods from entering the supply chain in the first place.

It would also seek to streamline communication among agencies and use new technologies to spot problem products.

The task is a formidable one, with $2 trillion in U.S. imports in 2006, from 825,000 separate importers. But as food imports grow 15 percent a year, the FDA inspected about 1 percent of the goods under its purview in fiscal 2006.

GAPS IN PLAN?

One Senate aide said it was too early to tell whether the Bush administration would, in its annual budget request, ask for the money needed to make lasting changes at the Food and Drug Administration and other safety agencies.

Critics at Tuesday's hearing, the latest in recent months since food scares raised the issue's profile on Capitol Hill, see the plan as a missed opportunity.

"Congress should recognize that this plan outlines only a few incremental steps that are not sufficient to prevent the food safety problems consumers experienced just last year," Caroline Smith DeWaal, director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, said in prepared remarks.

"The gaps in the FDA's Food Protection Plan are both numerous and dangerous," she said.  Continued...