Ensuring food safety therefore cannot be achieved by focusing on domestic products exclusively. FDA’s System for Allowing the Entry of Imported Foods

To ensure that FDA is notified of all imported food products under its jurisdiction, an importer must file both an import notice and certain shipping information and, for shipments valued over $1,250, a bond to cover the goods for release with Customs within 5 days of the shipment’s arrival at a U.S. port of entry. FDA does not visually check or inspect these released shipments. If the imported products do not meet U.S. requirements, they are stamped “U.S. Specifically, this report discusses (1) the differences in the agencies’ authorities and approaches for ensuring the safety of imported foods and (2) the agencies’ efforts to target their resources. Our work focused on the two principal federal agencies with responsibility for ensuring the safety of imported foods—FDA and FSIS. FDA’s Lack of Authority for Equivalent Inspection Systems in Exporting Countries Diminishes Its Ability to Protect Consumers From Unsafe Foods

FSIS shares the burden of ensuring the safety of the imported foods it regulates with the exporting country, while FDA primarily relies on inspections at the U.S. ports of entry to determine the safety of the imported foods under its jurisdiction. Because FDA is currently able to inspect less than 2 percent of the foods imported under its jurisdiction there is reason to question whether this approach adequately protects U.S. consumers. In contrast, FDA relies on port-of-entry inspections to ensure that imported foods are safe. For example, both visual inspections and laboratory tests are inadequate to detect Cyclospora, according to CDC. Agencies Have Not Effectively Targeted Their Resources on Imported Foods Posing Greater Risks

FSIS and FDA are not deploying their inspection resources to maximum advantage. As a result, FSIS’ resources are not being focused on imported foods posing the greater safety risk. With respect to FDA, its system for identifying shipments for inspection is hampered by work plans that do not set clear priorities for inspectors in making selection decisions, a failure to make relevant health risk data readily available to its inspectors to help them select shipments to inspect, and a failure to ensure that importer-provided information on incoming shipments is accurate. However, the system does not use this information to identify patterns of violations, such as firms or countries with repeated problems, that are directly related to food safety. Furthermore, FDA inspectors do not have ready access to some useful data in OASIS when deciding which products to inspect. To provide more accurate and accessible information to FDA and thus minimize inconsistencies in inspectors’ subjective decisions, we recommend that the Secretary of Health and Human Services direct the Commissioner, FDA, to clarify and emphasize the guidance inspectors should use when making decisions on which shipments to inspect and test; modify the Operational and Administrative System for Import Support system so that (1) it automatically reviews the Import Alert and Low-Acid Canned Food databases and recommends appropriate actions to inspectors and (2) inspectors can consider previous laboratory test results, which are stored in the Laboratory Management System database, in choosing shipments for inspections and tests; and ensure that the field offices are taking appropriate corrective action, when warranted, against importers that repeatedly enter incorrect shipping information into the Operational and Administrative System for Import Support database. 3. 4. Comments From the Food Safety and Inspection Service

The following is GAO’s comment on the Food Safety and Inspection Service’s letter dated April 7, 1998. 3.
Why GAO Did This Study

Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed efforts of federal programs to ensure the safety of food imports, focusing on the: (1) differences in the agencies' authorities and approaches for ensuring the safety of imported foods; (2) agencies' efforts to target their resources on foods posing risks; and (3) weaknesses in the controls over imported foods.

What GAO Found

GAO noted that: (1) federal agencies cannot ensure that the growing volume of imported foods is safe for consumers; (2) although the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) require imported foods to meet the same standards as domestic foods, their approaches to enforcing these requirements differ; (3) by law, FSIS places the principal burden for safety on the exporting countries by allowing imports only from those countries with food safety systems it deems to be equivalent to the U.S. system; (4) FDA, lacking such legal authority, allows food imports from almost any country and takes on the burden of ensuring the safety of imported foods as they arrive at U.S. ports of entry; (5) relying on port-of-entry inspections to detect and prevent unsafe foods is ineffective, given that: (a) this approach does not ensure that foods are produced under adequately controlled conditions; (b) FDA currently inspects less than 2 percent of all foreign shipments; and (c) inspection will not detect some organisms, such as Cyclospora, for which visual inspections and laboratory tests are inadequate; (6) FSIS and FDA are not deploying their inspection resources to maximum advantage; (7) FSIS focuses its inspection and testing resources on shipments from exporting firms with a history of violations; (8) however, many of the violations may bear little relationship to food safety; (9) using available data on health-related risks from shipments that do not meet U.S. standards could help FSIS focus more closely on the imports posing the greater risks; (10) FDA's annual work plan does not set achievable targets for inspection activities; (11) as a result, inspectors do not have clear guidance for conducting inspections; (12) FDA does not make health risk data readily available to guide inspectors' selections; (13) when making decisions on which shipments to inspect, FDA relies on importers' descriptions of shipments' contents, which are often incorrect; (14) FDA's procedures for ensuring that unsafe imported foods do not reach U.S. consumers are vulnerable to abuse by unscrupulous importers; (15) in some cases, when FDA decides to inspect shipments, the importers have already marketed the goods; (16) in other cases, when FDA finds contamination and calls for importers to return shipments to the Customs Service for destruction or reexport, importers ignore this requirement or substitute other goods for the original shipment; and (17) such cases of noncompliance seldom result in a significant penalty.