Bringing our Food Safety System into the 21st Century

Welcome to the RFF Weekly Policy Commentary. The commentary is meant to provide an easy way to learn about important policy issues related to environmental, natural resource, energy, urban, and public health problems.

Each year, an estimated 76 million people become sick and 5,000 die from foodborne illness in the United States. In recent years, foodborne illness incidents have been prominently in the news. Congress has been holding hearings to determine what can be done. This week's commentary by RFF's Sandra Hoffmann identifies how and where U.S. food safety policy needs to change in order to ensure public safety in the face of our rapidly changing food supply system.

Next week's commentary will stay on food issues. Cormac Ó Gráda will provide a historical perspective on famines.

Over the past two years, a succession of cases of foodborne illnesses, many serious and some even fatal, has raised questions about the effectiveness of the U.S. food safety system. Our current system is based on procedures that have accumulated over the past century in response to various crises, scandals, and discoveries. Some are now seriously out of date. In other cases, new issues have emerged that the system was never designed to address.

The problem, at its root, is that hazards, foods, food sources, and food marketing are all changing rapidly, while our policies are not. Our meat inspection is governed by a 1906 act that still mandates visual inspection of every carcass processed in the country. Yet today's major hazards are microbial. New problems arise regularly and sometimes unpredictably. E. Coli O157:H7, a potentially lethal bacterium, wasn't even recognized as a foodborne pathogen until 1982.

Changes in products and processes can create unforeseen problems. For example, a major shift has occurred in how ground meat is processed: today, meat from multiple sources is blended in large batches and distributed across the country, creating heightened potential for product contamination and illness. Another significant shift is the growing amount of food we now import. Consumers certainly benefit from flexibility in the food supply through lower prices, greater variety, and better nutrition throughout the year. But those benefits may be coming at the cost of increased risk.

The right response is to start thinking about food safety policy as a problem in modern risk management. In this context, risk management involves the ability to monitor changes in food safety risks system-wide in something like real time and the flexibility to redeploy resources to control these risks as needed. Carrying this out will involve recognizing who has least-cost access to information on how risks are generated and can most efficiently be controlled, and using this knowledge in designing policy. The United States, largely at the initiative of federal agencies and industry, has moved in this direction for the past two decades. But this effort has been seriously hampered by antiquated legislation and severe federal funding cuts.

Risk management of imports

Roughly 45 percent of fresh fruit and 80 percent of seafood consumed in the United States is now imported. Globalization of the U.S. food supply poses three major challenges: volume, rapidly changing sourcing (particularly for food additives), and enforcement. Given the increasing volume of imports, it is clear that border inspection alone will not assure safety. With more and more countries exporting to the United States, it is also unlikely that in-country inspection will fully address the problem. Extension of HACCP-like approaches to supply chain management for vertically integrated firms and use of third-party certification will have to play an increased role. And government needs to police conflicts of interest in these systems and to verify that certification systems are doing their job.

An end to fragmented federal governance

The pizza in your freezer complies with food safety regulations from six different federal agencies. Despite significant effort at coordination through inter-agency agreements, this fragmentation of authority, with the predictable turf battles, competition for budgets, and quarrels over priorities, remains a fundamental problem. But agency unification without legislative reform that authorizes modern approaches to regulation and allows flexible deployment of resources to focus on the most cost-effective opportunities for risk reduction will do little good.

Developing a risk-based food safety system, and pulling together a unified agency to administer it, would require a major reconstruction effort by the White House and Congress. That kind of effort most commonly occurs only after a disaster. The question is whether the political process can achieve a reform of such complexity without first paying the heavy price that a serious breakdown in food safety would exact.

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Views expressed are those of the author. RFF does not take institutional positions on legislative or policy questions.

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