International Food Safety

by Food and Drug Administration (FDA)

Mike Wehr has his bags packed. His tickets are bought, his hotel reservations confirmed, and all other necessary arrangements made. Wehr is about to leave the country, again. Last year alone he was out of the United States a half dozen times. He went to Belgium and Australia twice, and to Japan and Brazil once. In the near future, Wehr expects to go back to each of those countries once and perhaps to Hungary as well. In all, he is on the road at least 60 days a year on official U.S. government business.

Wehr's mission is simple: to help make the world's food safe to eat here in the United States regardless of where it is planted, produced or packaged. He is one of a small but growing number of Food and Drug Administration employees who work with international standards-setting institutions, multinational health and trade organizations, and government and private agencies in other countries around the world.

And it's a changing world. In the past, FDA focused most of its food safety efforts within the U.S. borders, where it has legal authority. But changes in trade, consumer demand for variety, and an increasingly complex regulatory system have created new challenges for the agency. On one hand, the FDA Modernization Act, passed in 1997, requires the agency to cooperate with other countries and international institutions. On the other, FDA often finds that U.S. standards and rules differ from those of other developed countries. Meanwhile, FDA works with developing countries to help them understand and meet U.S. standards for foods and agricultural products they export to the United States.

"It's a very different landscape for this agency than it was five or six years ago," says Wehr, one of FDA's representatives on food issues to Codex Alimentarius, an international standards-setting group based in Rome. "There has been a fundamental change in the importance [of international food safety issues to FDA]. We have to be part of the international arena. That is a new role for us. It is a role that continues to evolve every day."

New Ways To Work Together

Even at home, FDA cannot act alone on international food issues since other governmental agencies play major roles, including the U.S. Departments of Agriculture, State and Commerce, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, among others. Further, all federal activities involving Codex are managed within USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS).

As much as anything else, consumer demand drives these changes, especially the shifts in where American companies and consumers get their food. "Food has become a global commodity," says Janice Oliver, deputy director of FDA's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (CFSAN). "We Americans have changed our eating habits. We used to eat whatever was grown locally and in season, and only one or two varieties of anything. Today, food is international. It is from Central and South America or Europe or the Asian countries or the islands of the world."

More than ever before, Americans can buy more imported foods at local grocery stores and supermarkets, adds Linda Horton, director of FDA's international agreements staff, because of improved ways of packaging and preserving food, and more rapid means of transporting it. That, she says, means American consumers "can get anything from anywhere at almost any time."

According to USDA's Economic Research Service, Americans are eating more imported foods than ever before. So much so that imports of processed foods rose 5.8 percent in 1998, the last full year for which complete records are available. The estimated value of food imports in 1998 hit $32 billion, a new U.S. record. Moreover, food imports exceeded exports in 1998 by $2.6 billion, the first U.S. agricultural trade deficit since 1991.

The numbers for individual commodities are even more striking. Sixty-two percent of all fish, fish products and shellfish eaten by Americans, for example, came from abroad in 1997. That's up from 45 percent in 1980.

Similarly, Americans ate almost half again as much fresh fruits from other countries in 1997 as in 1980, up from 24 to 34 percent. Imported fresh vegetables accounted for more than 10 percent of vegetable consumption in 1997, compared with 5.4 percent in 1980. And foreign-grown wheat totaled 10.4 percent of the American diet in 1997, up from 0.4 percent 20 years ago.

As a result, FDA is more involved in foreign trade issues now than ever, says Catherine Carnevale, director of CFSAN's office of constituent operations. To ensure that the food Americans eat is safe to consume, the agency inspects imported food and refuses entry to unsafe, adulterated or mislabeled products, using the same standards as for domestic food. Under the evolving international rules, FDA now certifies that American-made seafood and dairy products sold abroad meet the importing country's requirements and are the same products as those sold in this country.

Whatever the specific role, FDA's focus remains on safety. "We are here to protect American consumers," Carnevale says. "Our goal is to improve the safety of all foods consumed in the United States." Similar aims drive U.S. Department of Agriculture policies. "We have legislative mandates to set standards and encourage trade in food products, but safety comes first," says Catherine Woteki, USDA's undersecretary for food safety. "All agencies of the U.S. government are unanimous that a science-based health and safety policy is our paramount guiding principle. Fair trade will follow."

But neither FDA nor USDA can inspect every food package brought into the United States. " We don't have the resources to examine all imported products or to inspect most overseas production facilities," FDA's Horton says, adding, "We have very porous borders. We need to work with those who export food to the United States [to make sure it's safe leaving those countries]. Cooperating with them is one way of protecting American consumers and promoting public health worldwide."

About the Author

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FDA is A United States government body that oversees medical devices, including contact lenses, intraocular lenses, excimer lasers and eyedrops. In the US, these products must be approved by the FDA before they can be marketed.