Summary

Federal agencies cannot ensure that the growing volume of imported foods is safe for consumers. The Food Safety and Inspection Service, which has jurisdiction over meat, poultry, and some egg products, places the burden for safety on the exporting countries by allowing imports only from those countries with food safety systems that it deems to be equivalent to the U.S. system. In contrast, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which regulates all other foods, lacks such legal authority. As a result, it allows food imports from almost any country and takes on the burden of ensuring the safety of imported foods as they arrive at U.S. ports of entry. Port-of-entry inspections are ineffective, however, because (1) this approach does not guarantee that foods are produced under adequately controlled conditions; (2) FDA currently inspects less than two percent of all foreign shipments; and (3) inspections will not detect some organisms, such as cyclospora. In addition, GAO questions whether the Food Safety and Inspection Service and FDA are targeting their inspection resources at those imported foods posing the greatest safety risks. Moreover, FDA's procedures for ensuring that unsafe imported foods do not reach U.S. consumers are vulnerable to abuse by unscrupulous importers. GAO summarized this report in testimony before Congress; see: Food Safety: Federal Efforts to Ensure Imported Food Safety Are Inconsistent and Unreliable, by Robert E. Robertson, Associate Director for Food and Agriculture Issues, before the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs. GAO/T-RCED-98-191, May 14 (nine pages).

GAO noted that: (1) federal agencies cannot ensure that the growing volume of imported foods is safe for consumers; (2) although the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) require imported foods to meet the same standards as domestic foods, their approaches to enforcing these requirements differ; (3) by law, FSIS places the principal burden for safety on the exporting countries by allowing imports only from those countries with food safety systems it deems to be equivalent to the U.S. system; (4) FDA, lacking such legal authority, allows food imports from almost any country and takes on the burden of ensuring the safety of imported foods as they arrive at U.S. ports of entry; (5) relying on port-of-entry inspections to detect and prevent unsafe foods is ineffective, given that: (a) this approach does not ensure that foods are produced under adequately controlled conditions; (b) FDA currently inspects less than 2 percent of all foreign shipments; and (c) inspection will not detect some organisms, such as Cyclospora, for which visual inspections and laboratory tests are inadequate; (6) FSIS and FDA are not deploying their inspection resources to maximum advantage; (7) FSIS focuses its inspection and testing resources on shipments from exporting firms with a history of violations; (8) however, many of the violations may bear little relationship to food safety; (9) using available data on health-related risks from shipments that do not meet U.S. standards could help FSIS focus more closely on the imports posing the greater risks; (10) FDA's annual work plan does not set achievable targets for inspection activities; (11) as a result, inspectors do not have clear guidance for conducting inspections; (12) FDA does not make health risk data readily available to guide inspectors' selections; (13) when making decisions on which shipments to inspect, FDA relies on importers' descriptions of shipments' contents, which are often incorrect; (14) FDA's procedures for ensuring that unsafe imported foods do not reach U.S. consumers are vulnerable to abuse by unscrupulous importers; (15) in some cases, when FDA decides to inspect shipments, the importers have already marketed the goods; (16) in other cases, when FDA finds contamination and calls for importers to return shipments to the Customs Service for destruction or reexport, importers ignore this requirement or substitute other goods for the original shipment; and (17) such cases of noncompliance seldom result in a significant penalty.