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.

Tooling around

This actually looks promising. Space age tools may help reveal fecal matter on produce, the USDA ARS reported recently. Portable inspection devices that detect food safety and quality problems are being developed by USDA ARS scientists.

Prototypes include binoculars with lenses that detect fecal matter on meat, produce or processing equipment—as well as diseases or quality defects. A camera/light combination can be helmet-mounted or used in a hand-held device to expose fecal matter as white specks on an eye wear-mounted computer display.

The cost of food safety

I asked Tom Stenzel about the potential cost to the industry if the FDA were to assume a stronger regulatory profile. Would the FDA try to put the costs back on the industry through user fees? Stenzel said that he believes they would not or could not. There is a clear precedent that food safety is a cost borne by the public, just as it is a benefit to the public. While drug companies pay dearly to bring their drugs on the market, the argument is different for food.

In that context, the marketing agreement being put in place in California may be more costly to the industry. It is needed, of course, but the industry will bear more of the costs of administering the agreement. In fact, one California legislator argues in this article that is why the industry should welcome state regulation of production practices.

Florez wants the state to allocate as much as $25 million to pay for government inspectors who will have the authority to quarantine fields that violate the regulations.
“We're not trying to dictate to them how to grow a product, but what we are trying to dictate to them is how to produce a safe product,” Florez said.
Some observers said letting the industry provide the rules would put new standards in place faster than the more cumbersome legislative process.
Florez invited the industry to adopt its own rules as his bill moves through Sacramento.
Then, he said, “once our regulation comes into effect, there will be very little cost for them.”



He's wrong about that. Ill conceived rules by lawmakers unfamiliar with the industry could cost growers much, much more

Here is coverage from The Los Angeles Times on this news.

FDA advisory commitee?

I think it might be time for the industry to petition the Food and Drug Administratoin for an advisory committee that provides industry advice to that agency. I'm sure there are many informal relationships already, with produce industry lobbyists and FDA regulators in close contact.

The USDA's fruit and vegetable advisory committee is useful because it address many issues important to the industry, including nutrition programs, block grants, PACA, inspection services, market news and more.

However, in the Jan. 23-24 advisory meeting, the topic de jour was food safety. FDA has jurisdiction over produce safety and not the USDA. While there is discussion of a federal marketing agreement or marketing order pertaining to produce safety, that concept seems ill-suited to the call for strong federal oversight of produce safety.

If the industry - the farm to table supply chain, no less - is looking at formalized FDA oversight to a degree not experience before, the FDA needs every chance to hear from fruit and vegetable growers, wholesalers and retailers as they create the new fabric of regulation.