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.
