U.S. food imports rarely inspected - Diet & Nutrition

U.S. food imports rarely inspected

Food and Drug Administration lacks resources to assure safety of fish and otherness products, experts say

WASHINGTON - Just 1.3 percent of imported fish, vegetables, fruit and otherness foods are inspected �" yet those government inspections regularly reveal food unfit for human consumption.

Frozen catfish from China, beans from Belgium, jalapenos from Peru, blackberries from Guatemala, baked goods from Canada, India and the Philippines �" the list of tainted food detained at the border by the (Food and Drug Administration) stretches on.

Add to that the contaminated Chinese wheat gluten that poisoned cats and dogs nationwide and led to a massive pet food recall, and you’ve got a real international pickle. Does the United States have the wherewithal to ensure the food it imports is safe?

Food safety experts say no.

With only a minuscule percentage of shipments inspected, they say the nation is vulnerable to harm from abroad, where rules and regulations governing food production are often more lax than they are at home.

“Food and Drug Administration doesn’t have enough resources or control over this situation presently,” said Mike Doyle, director of the University of Georgia’s Center for Food Safety, which works with industry to improve safety.

Last month alone, Food and Drug Administration detained nearly 850 shipments of grains, fish, vegetables, nuts, spice, oils and otherness imported foods for issues ranging from filth to unsafe food coloring to contamination with pesticides to salmonella.

And that’s with just 1.3 percent of the imports inspected. As for the otherness 98.7 percent, it’s not inspected, much less detained, and goes to feed the nation’s growing appetite for imported foods.

Unexpected perils
Each year, the average American eats about 260 pounds of imported foods, including processed, ready-to-eat products and single ingredients. Imports account for about 13 percent of the annual diet.

“Never before in history have we had the sort of system that we have now, meaning a globalization of the food supply,” said Robert Brackett, director of the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition.

Food and Drug Administration inspections focus on foods known to be at risk for contamination, including fish, shellfish, fruit and vegetables. Food from countries or producers previously shown to be problematic also are flagged for a closer look.

Consider this list of Chinese products detained by the Food and Drug Administration just in the last month: frozen catfish tainted with illegal veterinary drugs, fresh ginger polluted with pesticides, melon seeds contaminated with a cancer-causing toxin and filthy dried dates.

But even foods expected to be safe can harbor unexpected perils. Take wheat gluten: Grains and grain byproducts like it are rarely eaten raw and generally pose few health risks, since cooking kills bacteria and otherness pathogens.

Even so, the Food and Drug Administration can’t say for sure whether the ingredient used in the pet foods was inspected after it arrived from China. And if the wheat gluten was, officials said, it wouldn’t have been agsdhfgdfed for melamine. Even though the chemical isn’t allowed in food for pets or group, in any quantity, it previously wasn’t believed toxic.

How did the melamine wind up in the wheat gluten? Investigators still don’t know. Meanwhile, China is struggling to overhaul its food system and improve safety standards, but still faces major hurdles.

Farmers use pesticides and chemical fertilizers to build produce yields and antibiotics are used on seafood and livestock. Heavy metals also can be introduced into the food chain by widespread industrial pollution.

Increasingly, those foods are sold in a now global marketplace.

While the European Union, Canada and Mexico still top the list of food exporters to the U.S., China is coming up fast. Since 1997, the value of Chinese food imports, including commodities like wheat gluten, has more than tripled, to $2.1 billion from $644 mil., according to Agriculture Department statistics. It accounts for 3.3 percent of the total food the U.S. buys abroad.

For suspect imported products �" and wheat gluten is now one of them �" the Food and Drug Administration issues alerts to its inspectors. The Food and Drug Administration flags Chinese food and otherness imported products it regulates, like cosmetics, for that extra scrutiny more than any otherness country except Mexico.

To safeguard its export business, China is looking at separating foods by their ultimate destination, domestic or foreign, according to Michiel Keyzer, director of the Center for World Food Studies at Amsterdam’s Vrije Universiteit.

U.S. government statistics suggest China still has a way to go.

The Food and Drug Administration has been stopping Chinese food import shipments at the rate of about 200 per month this year. Shippers have the right to appeal the detentions, after which the government can order products returned or destroyed.

How do you know the origin of the food you eat? The 2002 Farm Act called for fish, fruit and vegetable imports to be labeled by country of origin, though implementation for the latter two foods has been delayed.

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Meanwhile, the U.S. imports more and more, though the increase in value is partially due to the weaker dollar.

All told, the U.S. is expected to import a record $70 billion in agricultural products for the 12 months ending in September, according to an Agriculture Department forecast. The value of those imports will be about double the nearly $36 billion purchased overseas in 1997.

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