The FDA's take

Get to know the name of Nega Beru. He is very important to the industry.

I visited briefly today with Nega Beru, director of the Office of Plant and Dairy Foods for the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition for the Food and Drug Administration. He said he saw United's letter a couple of days ago and views it as a "positive step."

Beru said the agency was planning a couple of hearings on produce safety in the near future. No date has been set yet for the hearings but he said they would be the venue to explore issues like commodity specific guidelines and farm to table regulations.

Importantly, he did say statistics from the Centers for Disease Control reflect that a select number of commodities account for the majority of food borne illness outbreaks. That suggests (in my inference) that different regulatory standards could be place for different commodities.


Relative to inspection of foreign farms - a topic of intense interest by U.S. growers (and, no doubt, international suppliers) - Beru said the FDA has conducted inspection at foreign farms, but typically in conjunction with or with trained personnel from regulatory authorities of those countries.

What about farm to table regulation? Beru said that while the 1998 document on Good Agricultural Practices applied to growers, the FDA 2004 Produce Safety Action Plan dealt with the supply chain. I read that as FDA's view that it won't necessarily be precluded from looking up and down the supply chain in food safety regulation.


It's all in play, which should make those FDA hearings very interesting.