Posted February 2, 2015
Lawmakers have proposed a bill that would establish a single food safety agency by uniting the oversight functions of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), and other agencies, according to a Reuters article available here. The Meating Place also published an article available here and Food Safety News here.
Senator Richard Durbin and Representative Rosa DeLauro said that the bill, Safe Food Act of 2015, would create a single federal agency with an administrator directly appointed by the President.
The duo introduced similar legislation in 1999, 2004, 2005, and 2007, according to Meating Place.
Durbin and DeLauro referred to food safety as an issue of national security, according to Food Safety News.
“What the bill does is remedy the situation,” said DeLauro. “With a single agency, we believe our country will be able to have the ability to detect relatively minor problems before they become major outbreaks.”
The Safe Food Act of 2015 would “provide the Food Safety Administration with mandatory recall authority for unsafe food, require risk assessments and preventive control plans to reduce adulteration, authorize enforcement actions to strengthen contaminant performance standards, improve foreign food import inspections, and require full food traceability to better identify sources of outbreaks.”
DeLauro stated that the bill builds on the improvements made in FDA’s Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA).
Each year approximately 48 million people, or 1 in 6 Americans, suffer from foodborne illness, and more than 100,000 individuals are hospitalized and thousands die, according to Reuters.
Currently a majority of food safety responsibility lies with the FDA, and the USDA oversees meat, poultry, and processed eggs.
For more information on food safety, please visit the National Agricultural Law Center’s website here.
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