In the September/October issue of Food Insight the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Undersecretary for Food Safety, Elsa Murano, and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Deputy Commissioner Lester Crawford discussed challenges for the U.S. food supply. We close our interview with their perspectives on the international elements of food safety.

Q: What challenges do you face given the increasingly global nature of our food supply?

Murano: We know that we're getting a lot of foods from other countries. That's on the increase, so our challenge is to make sure that the foods that are imported from other countries into the United States are produced under as equivalent conditions as what we have here in the U.S. and we do audits on a regular basis to make sure that that is maintained.

Crawford: The FDA, by its law, takes food from everywhere. So our borders, with respect to FDA, have to be inspected. We have to increase the number of inspections, but more importantly, we have to rearrange food inspection from other countries so that it fits the systems approach that is based on risk. If a food—like bananas, for example, because of the unique nature of the foodstuff itself—poses virtually no risk, then we should adjust inspection accordingly. For some food imports, like some of the dietary supplements that come from countries that are not as developed and also represent food matrices that we are not familiar with and contaminations that we might be familiar with, we really need to do a stronger job of inspection. But we need to risk assess all these, and FDA has not done that in the past.

We are rapidly trying to change that at FDA by applying risk assessment and risk management techniques to imported foods, and we are also trying to put a system of inspection forward that takes advantage of concentrating on those foods with the greatest risks and de-emphasizing inspection of foods with no risk or little risk.

Q: How have you weighed in on the debate with Europe on the use of the precautionary principle on issues such as food biotechnology or bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE)?

Murano: The U.S. Codex office is here at USDA. The Meat and Poultry Hygiene Committee of Codex has been addressing some of these issues. From our perspective at the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) we are very well connected on the international scene in terms of making sure that they know where the Bush Administration stands. I know on the issue of BSE part of the challenge is that you have multiple agencies that are involved in this particular issue, not only FSIS. We have to make sure that we engage the international community but that we stand strong. We have a lot of partners in Latin America specifically that agree with the positions that we've taken on some of these issues that would benefit greatly from biotechnology. And so even though a lot of times we seem to disagree with our European friends, there are a lot of other folks in the world that agree with our positions, and the challenge is trying to convince those who disagree on why we believe as we do.

Crawford: We have been very active with that. We are engaging at a much higher level with both WHO [the World Health Organization] and FAO [the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization], but also directly with the various European Union authorities who deal with those products that we regulate, including foods. I have personally gone to meet with my European counterparts to explain our position.

Our position is essentially this: We think the precautionary principle is something that you do when you have great fear of a risk, which we did, for example, with BSE. We invoked some cautionary steps in that we initiated a risk assessment. As soon as the risk assessment came in, we released some products [for import from other countries] like gelatin from detention—and also [stopped them] from being banned in this country.

I think that's the only ethical way to do it. If you invoke a precautionary principle and keep a product out of your country that is approved in another country that you have a trade agreement with, such as we have with Europe, then that's not ethical.

The country that invokes the precautionary principle may be doing so either based on politics or artificial trade restrictions or some other kind of concern, which is just not legitimate within the meaning of the World Trade Organization agreements that we all ascribe to and are signatories of.

Read the previously published article that appeared in the September/October 2002 Food Insight: “Part I — Ask The Experts.”