The U.S. needs a national food strategy that incorporates oversight authorities from the Food and Drug Administration and USDA to better protect the domestic food supply, a former FDA official said Friday.
“If we created a single food safety agency, then you'd have the structure to support this strategy,” Frank Yiannas, former FDA deputy commissioner of food policy and response, told members of the North American Agricultural Journalists.
Yiannas said FDA needs to modernize. “We’re still trying in the year 2023 to have a compliance oversight that’s a 20th century model,” Yiannas said. “It’s very outdated.”
“We write rules about how establishments should operate. And we write standards of identities of how the foods should conform. And then we come in and inspect these facilities once every five years or once every three years, and pretend to think that that's a good indicator of how these facilities are operating on any type of ongoing basis," he said.
To move food safety oversight into the 21st century, Yiannas suggested better data can provide a pathway to create a “paradigm shift” in how agencies regulate foods.
“It’s time to move towards a more data-driven oversight which says when we inspect and how we inspect,” he said.
Yiannas said previous administrations have asked for a national strategy, but it's all been done through collaboration, partnerships and influence, but nothing structurally that makes regulatory agencies work together. The lion’s share of the food system involved in interstate commerce is regulated by FDA.
Brian Ronholm, director of food policy at Consumer Reports, said FDA's current reorganization efforts can eventually lead to creation of a standalone agency. Ronholm used to work for Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., who has advocated for a single food agency,
The first phase is to redesign FDA to establish a culture of prevention. The next phase would be to combine USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service with FDA's food safety components to form a single independent agency, he said.
Ronholm said significant progress has been made on improving food safety, but it’s a system that “needs constant vigilance from all stakeholder groups.” This includes industry recognizing evolving and emerging threats, consumers realizing that they have a role in monitoring these threats, and regulators being up to speed on those threats so they have a system in place to address the risks.
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“We can’t be complacent on this being one of the safest food safety systems in the world,” Ronholm said.
On the webinar, Ronholm said many foundations are also transitioning research dollars out of food safety and into nutrition. “We’re losing out on that opportunity to apply some of those research dollars towards looking into these emerging threats and also these emerging technologies and how it can address food safety,” he said.
Yiannas said there’s more work to be done in implementation of the Food Safety Modernization Act signed into law over a decade ago.
“Some of it is not necessarily about new authorities, but just delivering on the authorities that were granted,” Yiannas said of FSMA's emphasis on preventing foodborne illness rather than reacting after an outbreak has occurred.
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