Part 1 : Sept. 11 WPPC-FDA Meeting Michelle Smith

From the FDA-WPPC session of Sept. 11, we are joining the program barely in progress. Michelle Smith of the FDA speaks to WPPC attendees about rulemaking on GAPs and encouraging input....

From her bio:
Michelle is an interdisciplinary scientist with FDA's Office of Food Safety. She led the development of FDA's 1998 GAPs guidance, and had a leadership role with the 2004 Produce Safety Action Plan. Prior to coming to FDA, she was served on the faculty at the University of Maryland.

From Michelle Smith:

"On Sept. 2, the FDA published a Federal Register notice looking for information and data to help us update the 1998 good agricultural practices guidance. I think that the principles that were established in 1998 stood the test of time. Our experiences implementing that GAPs guidance, and certainly the experience of folks in industry trying to implement the GAPs guidance; have given us some ideas of the things we might improve. Working with the commodity specific work groups in a technical capacity has given me a chance to see how some of the thinking has changed.
The Federal Register notice has a list of questions to help focus comments; you are not bound to only comment on those questions, but they are intended to give you an idea of the kind of information and data we are looking for.
Again, what we ultimately do can only be as good as the information we have to work with; that’s my personal appeal to look at that and to the extent you can provide (input) to help make that better, please do.”