WASHINGTON, D.C. — The American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) says the proposed Safe Food Act, which would create an entirely new food safety agency, may sound like a good idea – but it’s not.

Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) and Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) introduced legislation to put all food safety responsibilities under a single new Food Safety Administrator earlier this year. The Safe Food Act also would modernize 100-year-old food safety laws and give the new chief a unified budget.

“Our current food safety system has turned into a food fight among dozens of federal agencies. This is politics at its worst, where American families rightfully demand our best,” said Durbin. ”Congress must summon the political will to protect America ‘s families with a modern, coordinated food safety agency, and that’s what we have set forth.”

Unequal responsibilities?

The government’s finite food safety resources are not equitably split between USDA and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the Bush Administration’s 2008 budget proposal makes matters worse, according to Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI).

USDA regulates 20 percent of the nation’s food supply, and the administration proposes giving the department $270 million in new money for food safety and security. FDA regulates 80 percent of the food supply, including fresh vegetables like spinach and lettuce, but would get only $10.6 million in new food safety money, despite being underfunded already.

“The Bush food safety budget defies logic,” said Caroline Smith DeWaal, director of food safety at CSPI, a nonprofit food safety and nutrition watchdog group that supports the legislation. “While the budget clearly recognizes the need for more funding for food safety, money is being directed at animal health problems and meat and poultry, at the expense of preventing outbreaks from fresh produce.”

The Safe Food Act would create an administration, similar to the Environmental Protection Agency, that would take responsibility for food safety and labeling from USDA and FDA. The bill would also establish a comprehensive program to protect public health and bolster consumer confidence in the safety of the food supply. Currently, food safety monitoring, inspection and labeling functions are spread across 12 federal agencies.

Durbin and DeLauro said the involvement of so many agencies can result in duplication of responsibilities, service gaps and inconsistencies and confusion about which agency oversees different types of food. They noted while FDA inspects frozen-cheese-pizza processors once every 10 years on average, USDA inspects frozen-pepperoni-pizza processors daily. Another example: Eggs still in the shell are under the jurisdiction of FDA, while USDA takes over once the eggs are broken.

“It makes no sense to have one agency regulate chickens and another regulate eggs, or to have one agency regulate cows and another to regulate milk,” said CSPI food safety staff attorney Ken Kelly.

“When one cabinet secretary is responsible for pepperoni pizza and another is responsible for cheese pizza, you know something’s wrong.”

Competing concerns

The new agency created by the lawmakers’ bill – dubbed the Food Safety Administration (FSA) – would be the first of its kind, say supporters, free from the entanglements of past regulators who have had to balance food safety with the competing priorities of drug approval or agriculture promotion.

AFBF disagrees. “It takes the existing food safety authorities away from the (USDA) and the Department of Health and Human Services, and moves all those authorities – in theory, most of the personnel – into a newly created independent food safety agency,” said Kelli Ludlum, AFBF policy specialist.

Such a move could actually create more problems than it solves, she said.

“We have some real concerns, just based on what we’ve seen with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, for example, that this would be very disruptive to the existing food safety system and could create gaping holes in the food safety system,” she said.

The Safe Food Act would consolidate the activities of various federal agencies responsible for the nation’s food supply, including USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service and Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition and the Commerce Department’s National Marine Fisheries Service.

Some of the new responsibilities under FSA would include regular random inspection of all food processing plants; a categorized review process for all foods to monitor and inspect based on risk, not name; increased oversight of imported foods; and established requirements for tracing foods to point of origin.

More funding

Ludlum recognizes that recent food safety concerns show the system needs improvements. “However, we don’t think that moving the authorities or simply moving people out of one agency and into another will really solve any of those problems. In fact, we think it probably is more disruptive to the system,” she said.

She says a big fix would be more funding for more USDA and FDA inspectors and enforcement of the rules.

GAO recently designated food safety as a high-risk federal government program. Agriculture, including all food production, is about 13 percent of the gross domestic product, and the largest industry in the United States.

Unsafe food poses a significant burden on consumers. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 76 million people suffer from foodborne illness each year, resulting in 325,000 hospitalizations and 5,000 deaths. Children and the elderly are most likely to experience severe cases of illness and death from foodborne pathogens.