Food safety on back burner

WASHINGTON —

A nationwide salmonella outbreak attributed to tomatoes comes just as Congress and President Bush are finishing a tug of war over their farm bill, which omits some of the highest-profile food-safety proposals that lawmakers once offered.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 300,000 Americans are hospitalized each year, and 5,000 die, because of food-borne illnesses.

The farm bill nonetheless remains silent on many food-safety issues.

The Senate, for instance, originally wanted a new 15-member food-safety commission to conduct a wide-ranging study and issue recommendations. The proposed commission ran into opposition in the House of Representatives, and negotiators killed it.

Similarly, Rep. Dennis Cardoza, D-Calif., wanted to move border plant and animal inspectors back to the Agriculture Department. The demoralized inspectors feel shortchanged under the Department of Homeland Security, congressional investigators said. The Bush administration opposed the transfer, and the provision died.

"The agriculture committees' orientation is not food safety," Waldrop said. "You can make small, incremental steps, but you are never going to make big structural food-safety changes through a farm bill."

"Food safety is never a key issue for any farm bill," Chris Waldrop, the food-policy director for the Consumer Federation of America, said Tuesday.

There are several reasons for that.

Politically, the House and Senate agriculture-committee members who write the farm bill tend to be protective of agribusiness. They aren't out to make enemies by imposing strict new rules.

Procedurally, responsibility for food safety is scattered among some 15 federal agencies. The farm bill focuses on the Agriculture Department, which handles meat and poultry. Produce and seafood are handled by the Food and Drug Administration. The stand-alone phrase "Food and Drug Administration" doesn't appear anywhere in the 673-page farm bill conference report, and the FDA is largely outside the bill's coverage.

Tactically, some lawmakers feared that a food-safety commission would sap momentum for a more ambitious FDA overhaul. On Thursday, a House Energy and Commerce Committee panel will hold a hearing on the FDA's food-safety work, with some House members pressing to give the federal agency mandatory-recall authority over tainted food.

"This situation is another chilling example of the flaws in our nation's food-safety system," declared Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Colo.

In other cases, though, farm-bill authors retreated from measures that some feared would undermine food safety.

Western fruit and vegetable growers, for instance, hoped that the farm bill would authorize self-regulation through industry-run marketing orders. Handlers of California leafy greens imposed such a plan after a 2006 outbreak of sickness traced to Salinas-area spinach tainted by E. coli bacteria. Environmentalists successfully opposed the idea of giving industry more power to regulate itself.

"It is clear from the California leafy-green experience that it is bad for natural resources and environmental protection," said Ferd Hoefner, the policy director for the Sustainable Agriculture Coalition.

The sprawling farm bill includes 15 titles, or subject areas, ranging from commodities to energy.

Food safety doesn't merit its own title.

The farm bill has a five-year price tag of $289 billion to $307 billion.

Only a small percentage of that addresses food safety. For instance, a new $230 million specialty-crop research-grant program devotes an unspecified fraction to fresh-produce safety.

Fresh produce increasingly comes from faraway states and even faraway countries, which is why contaminations increasingly crop up across the country, said Dr. Patricia Griffin, the chief of the disease centers' enteric disease epidemiology branch.

And federal authorities have yet to create a stronger set of rules and enforcement procedures for imports and U.S. produce. Many parties — food-safety advocates, food producers, congressional Republicans and Democrats and even some within the FDA — have said such rules are essential to make food safer.

In November the food and drug agency released a "food-protection plan," but the Bush administration did not ask for the money to finance parts of it until Monday night.

The health and human-services secretary, Michael O. Leavitt, said Monday that he would amend the administration's budget request by asking for an additional $275 million for next year, $125 million of which would go to food protection.

At a news conference, Leavitt said he "would like to once again strongly urge Congress to act quickly to enhance the safety of food and medical products," comments that angered some in Congress, including Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa.

Specter said that administration delays in seeking money for food-protection efforts at the food and drug agency amounted to "criminal negligence."

"The failure to have these inspections is subjecting people to bodily injury and death," said Specter, who sent a letter to Leavitt on Tuesday insisting that the additional money for the FDA should be included in a supplemental request this year, not in next year's budget.

Food-safety advocates criticized what they said was the government's inaction in preventing outbreaks of food poisoning.

"How many times does this have to happen before FDA gets serious about food safety?" asked Sarah Klein, a staff lawyer at the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

Additional information from

The New York Times