Effect Measure

The federal agency that's been front and center in warning the public about tainted spinach and contaminated peanut butter is conducting just half the food safety inspections it did three years ago.

The cuts by the Food and Drug Administration come despite a barrage of high-profile food recalls.

"We have a food safety crisis on the horizon," said Michael Doyle, director of the Center for Food Safety at the University of Georgia.

Between 2003 and 2006, FDA food safety inspections dropped 47 percent, according to a database analysis of federal records by The Associated Press.

That's not all that's dropping at the FDA in terms of food safety. The analysis also shows:

_There are 12 percent fewer FDA employees in field offices who concentrate on food issues.

_Safety tests for U.S.-produced food have dropped nearly 75 percent, from 9,748 in 2003 to 2,455 last year, according to the agency's own statistics. (Andrew Bridges and Seth Borenstein, AP)

Responding to fears of a bioterrorist attack on the nation's food supply, the FDA budget was increased after 9/11 and inspections increased. That was then. This is now:

"The only difference is now it's worse, because there are more inspections to do -- more facilities -- and more food coming into America, which requires more inspections," said Tommy Thompson, who as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services pushed to increase the numbers. He's now part of a coalition lobbying to turn around several years of stagnant spending.

The Bush administration's budget request for 2008 includes an additional $10.6 million for food safety at the FDA; the lobbying group said 10 times that increase is needed. Even though the FDA increased its overall spending on food between 2003 and 2006, those increases failed to keep pace with rising personnel costs.

"It's not just outsiders like us who have been watching it for a while. People who worked in the Bush administration are coming out and saying the agency is not working at its current resource levels. It just can't manage the job," said Caroline Smith DeWaal, director of food safety at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, an advocacy group.

[snip]

The shrunken ranks of inspectors have left the nation once again vulnerable, especially to problems in imported food, Thompson and others said. Doyle, whose center studies ways to improve food safety, called the nation's growing appetite for imported foods the "coming threat."

The United States last year imported about $10 billion more in food, feed and beverages than it exported, according to Census figures. Even as imports grow in volume and diversity, the number of FDA inspections is shrinking: agency inspectors physically examined just 1.3 percent of food imports last year, about three-quarters as much as in 2003.

Like the US Department of Agriculture, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which gets about 24% of the budget but is responsible for 80% of the food supply, responds it is now being smarter with its shrinking budget by "targeting" inspections based on risk. That's just what USDA says its doing.

I think.