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January 14, 2009
If you have to have regulation it should make sense
For reasons that defy logic, the nation’s food safety functions are split. The Agriculture Department inspects about 20 percent of the food supply (meat and poultry), and the Food and Drug Administration is responsible for almost everything else. And yet the Agriculture Department receives a majority of federal food safety dollars. ... In 1999, the Government Accountability Office (then called the General Accounting Office) issued a report called “U.S. Needs a Single Agency to Administer a Unified, Risk-Based Inspection System.” ... "The fragmented system was not developed under any rational plan but was patched together over many years to address specific health threats from particular food products," the report said. Efforts to address food safety, it says, are "hampered by inconsistent and inflexible oversight and enforcement authorities, inefficient resource use and ineffective coordination." ... Ms. DeLauro’s proposal to split the F.D.A. has won wide support among food-safety wonks. Under the new system, there would be a Food Safety Administration and a Federal Drug and Device Administration, with separate budgets and administrators reporting to the secretary of health and human services, who now oversees the F.D.A.Looking to Obama to Bring Logic to Food Safety
I've been concerned that we will start treating genetically modified food as a drug, requiring an extensive and expensive approval process before commercial use. It could be that separating these agencies could prevent that from happening. I doubt it. Because the drug regulators have better things to do then hassle the GM food producers, they get left alone. A dedicated agency would probably expand to promote its own influence, power, and budget and GM food would be one front to hit the public's levers to do so. Perhaps a piece of law in the creation of the new agency could forbid it from treating GM food as different from the fruits of traditional husbandry and selective breeding programs.
Posted by OneEyedMan at January 14, 2009 7:59 AM
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