Kill the FDA, Consumer Groups Tell Clinton

The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) and Safe Tables Our Priority (S.T.O.P.) urged President Clinton to form an independent federal food agency to assure American consumers that existing and emerging food hazards will be fully addressed.

"Bacteria in hamburger killed my son. Now it's showing up in more foods, like lettuce and unpasteurized juice," said Nancy Donley, president of S.T.O.P. "We have one food supply. We need one food agency."

Many of those examples represent emerging food safety problems. The groups noted, however, that the agency in charge of those serious hazards, the Food and Drug Administration, is poorly-funded and inadequately staffed.

"Last year, there was a bumper crop of foodborne illnesses from FDA-regulated foods," said Caroline Smith DeWaal, director of food safety at the CSPI. "Years of inadequate funding have left FDA with a food safety program that is little more than a recall agency for contaminated foods."

"FDA hasn't controlled food hazards that already exist, like deadly bacteria in oysters." said Vicki Peal, a Florida schoolteacher who lost her father to deadly oysters. "I fear the consequences of having this agency oversee new food safety threats."

The organizations praised the Clinton Administration for taking positive steps to improve food safety by adopting mandatory systems for preventing contamination in meat, poultry and seafood plants. However, in a memo to the President, they warned that piecemeal reform was not enough.

"The bottom line is that consumers are paying a terrible price for the inefficiencies and ineffectiveness of the existing system of foodborne illness prevention," the groups advised the President. "It is time to reinvent and rationalize the system."

The groups said that "piecemeal reforms" are not enough. "We need fundamental reform," they advised the President, "if we are to benefit from a more effective food safety system. We need a single federal food agency to address the unacceptably high rate of foodborne illness and inconsistent food safety policies across the federal government.

"We need the government to adopt food safety assurance systems that are proactive in identifying and preventing contamination rather than waiting until large food poisoning outbreaks and public outcry make action a political necessity."

"Effective government action could have prevented many illnesses and deaths over the past twenty years and could prevent countless future unnecessary tragedies," the report states.

"The history of the federal government's failure to curb the [Salmonella] epidemic illustrates the ineffectiveness of having multiple government agencies responsible for regulating the same food. The agencies were further hamstrung by a Congress that cut funding for a pilot control program just as it was beginning to show results and an industry that, except for producers in Pennsylvania, resisted attempts to prevent egg contamination on the farm."

Also signing onto the memorandum to the President are Consumer Federation of America, Public Voice for Food and Health Policy, Government Accountability Project, and United States Humane Society.