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Food watchdogs cut inspections

In what an official describes as a looming crisis, about half of food monitoring was eliminated from 2003 to 2006.

WASHINGTON - The federal agency that has 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.

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

After the Sept. 11 attacks, the FDA, at the urging of Congress, increased the number of food inspectors and inspections amid fears that the nation's food system was vulnerable to terrorists. Inspectors and inspections spiked in 2003, but now both have fallen enough to erase the gains.

"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 inspections from 2003 to 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.

Members of Congress also have renewed the focus on the safety of the nation's food supply amid highly publicized recalls sparked by food poisoning, including last year when E. coli was found to taint fresh spinach sold coast to coast. That outbreak killed three people and sickened nearly 200.

The latest big recall involves peanut butter believed tainted with salmonella, a bacterium found in feces that can cause severe diarrhea.

Fast Facts:

The food inspection shortfalls

- From 2003 to 2006, Food and Drug Administration food safety inspections dropped 47 percent.

- 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.

- The United States last year imported about $10-billion more in food, feed and beverages than it exported, according to census figures. However, 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.

- A recent Government Accountability Office report noted that most of the $1.7-billion the federal government allocates to food safety goes to the Agriculture Department, which is responsible for regulating about 20 percent of the food supply. The FDA, responsible for most of the other 80 percent, gets about 24 percent of the total.

[Last modified February 27, 2007, 00:52:39]