SEC. LEAVITT: This year more than $2 trillion worth of products are going to be imported into the United States. The product comes from 25,000 importers through 300 ports and land border crossings and postal facilities and other ports of entry, and experts are projecting that the amount will triple by 2015. In order to adapt to a rapidly growing and changing global economy, both the private and the public sector need to continually improve and change with it. On the 18th of July of this year the President asked me to chair an Interagency Working Group on Import Safety with the charge of conducting an across-the-board review of products that are imported into this country from around the world. The working group includes officials from 12 federal agencies, all of which are represented here today. My department, the Department of Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Department of Transportation, Agriculture, Trade, Consumer Product Safety Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Office of Management and Budget, Department of Commerce, State, and Justice.

In the past two months, Working Group members have been criss-crossing this country fact-finding. I personally visited more than two dozen cities. I've been in ports and post offices. I've been in railroads, at airports, seaports, warehouses, meat-packing facilities. I have been in freight hubs and border crossings and I visited wholesalers and retailers and fruit stands. On the 10th of September we were able to bring all of that together into a strategic framework which we presented to the President. It focuses on the full import cycle by building safety into the products that we purchase every step of the way. Based on the keystone principles that service a foundation-prevention, intervention, and response - this framework recommends six cross-cutting strategies.

The first is to advance common vision. Second, to increase accountability, enforceability, and enforcement and deterrence. The third is to focus on risks over the life cycle of imported products. The fourth is to build interoperable systems. Fifth is to foster a culture of collaboration. And last, to promote technologic innovation and new science that help us do a better job. It was an FDA inspector who said, Mr. Secretary, our job is to find the needle in the haystack, and we have to start first with technology to shrink the size of the haystack.

This is our framework that we presented to the President. We will direct our focus here, in the federal government, as we make better use of our resources and provide the greatest protection that possibly can be provided to American consumers in the future. We will continue to improve the inspection process for all products coming from across our borders, but we simply cannot inspect our way to safety. The federal government cannot and it should not attempt to physically inspect every product that enters the United States. Doing so would bring the international trade of this country to a standstill, and it would distract resources, limited resources from those imported goods that pose the greatest threats.

Instead, we need to create a better system that builds quality into the product from the very start, and that's what this is all about today. Our meeting is to identify and to recommend actions that the public and the private stakeholders can take to ensure the safety of our products, imported products, into the United States are at the highest level possible.

No system of safety can succeed without collaboration from everyone, everyone that's involved in the supply chain. We can share common interest in import safety. We all share that interest. At the same time, many of us have differing concerns about how to build safety into the system. The meeting we're having today is a chance for those concerns to be heard by the working group and by other stakeholders. We welcome your comment and we look forward to broadening our understanding as we listen to you, as we talk among ourselves.

As a next step, an action plan will be submitted to the President. We intend to do so by mid-November. It will lay out a road map with short and long-term recommendations for improving import safety. Those recommendations are still very much under discussion, and our conclusions about them will depend heavily on what we hear today.

So again, thank you for your willingness to collaborate among a broad spectrum. I am sure the time we spend here will be very productive.

And now I'd like to turn the time to the Acting Secretary of Agriculture Chuck Conner. I know he has a few words he'd like to express.

SEC. CHUCK CONNER: Thank you very much, Secretary Leavitt. And thank you all for being here. Secretary Leavitt, I do want to thank you for coordinating this event. The Working Group on Import Safety really has been working very hard under your leadership to evaluate the status of our current import procedures and to recommend important improvements to those procedures.

I'm honored to be part of this group in my new role, and I'd like to start off today by simply assuring you of my commitment to food safety on behalf of the consumers of this country. The United States, as has been noted, has the world's safest food supply. And that is a distinction that we take a great deal of pride in, but we do not take it for granted. The President convened this working group to make certain that we are using the most effective strategies to ensure safe food products for our citizens and to ensure that we maintain consumer confidence in our food system.

Secretary Leavitt and other members of the working group have traveled the country to inspect food plants, to see how safety procedures work in practice. They have talked to importers, inspectors, processors and producers to find out what works and where improvement can be made. As part of that process, we are eager, ladies and gentlemen, to get your comments today.

I think the fact that you are here shows that you view the challenge of improving our import safety efforts with the same seriousness and urgency that the President does, and that is the same sense that Secretary Leavitt and I share as well.

As you know and has been noted, on September 10th the Working Group released a strategic framework that focuses on every step of our import cycle. The keystones of this framework are prevention, early intervention, and of course rapid response to problems. USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service uses a comprehensive system to address these three keystones of safety in our imports of meat, poultry and processed ag products. It begins with a thorough analysis of each country's food laws and inspection systems to determine initial equivalents with our own safety procedures.

We continue with on-site audits of each country's food safety system to ensure equivalence is maintained as well. We also conduct port-of-entry inspection of all meat, poultry and processed egg products coming into the United States.

Every shipment that enters the country is checked by an FSIS inspector to confirm that it arrives from an approved country. The shipments are then checked for damage, accurate labeling, proper certification and of course the general condition of the shipment. About 10 percent of our imports of meat, poultry, and egg products as well are subjected to more intense inspection that include microbiological analysis for pathogens.

FSIS also employs more than 20 import surveillance liaison officers to coordinate with inspection program personnel and other federal agencies on potential biosecurity concerns related to imported product. All of these efforts are geared towards one primary goal, maintaining a free flow of goods across our borders while assuring the safety and quality Americans simply expect and demand of their food supply. We have already seen this year how interdependent the import and export markets are. Problems in one sector or product category can quickly spread to another.

Issues related to contaminated pet food set off a chain reaction that disrupted trade relations with China, a country whose importance as our trading partner for agricultural goods has grown so rapidly in the last five years, just as it has of course in manufactured goods.

The import issues are arising against a backdrop of continued growth in our own agricultural exports. They are on-track of course to set a record of $79 billion in sales this year, and our imports of agricultural products aren't far behind. We expect them to approach $70 billion as well. Now we expect both categories to be up more than $4 billion next year. We cannot afford to jeopardize such a large portion of our agricultural and frankly our national economy.

When an import of a certain product is contaminated, even if only a tiny percentage of the product is affected, of course, everyone suffers. We must be vigilant about maintaining our high standards for food quality and safety that American consumers expect. We owe it not only to our consumers but of course our farmers and ranchers and producers as well. And we must work with our trading partners to share best practices and agree on common standards of science-based approaches for food safety. This will allow us to quickly and effectively tackle any problems that arise in the future.

That is why we are looking forward to hearing your ideas on what should be done to improve the import safety regulations and practices that we have in place today. We all share a strong interest in seeing our government's resources deployed where they can do the most to protect us against lapses in food quality. We are working on an action plan for import safety, and of course, as Secretary Leavitt has noted, your suggestions will be taken into account for this plan.

So I do want to thank you all for coming. We look forward to your input. We look forward to working with you on this issue that is of utmost importance to our entire food and agricultural sector.

Thank you all for being here.