Three Food Safety Rules Grow Moldy at OIRA, as Import-Related Outbreaks Continue

About 15 percent of all foods we consume are imported. Looking at some particular categories, the numbers are far more striking: imports make up 91 percent of our seafood, 60 percent of our fruits and vegetables, and 61 percent of our honey. Most of these imports come from developing countries that lack any effective health and safety regulation - like China, which has had a seemingly endless run of food safety scandals and yet supplies 50 percent of our apple juice, 80 percent of our tilapia, and 31 percent of our garlic. Unsanitary practices in these countries are well-documented: Vietnamese farmers are known to send shrimp to America in tubs of ice made from bacteria-infested water; and Mexican laborers are often given filthy bathrooms and no place to wash their hands before gathering onions and grape tomatoes for export. Despite the obvious risks of adulteration and contamination, the resource-strapped Food and Drug Administration (FDA) inspected only 2 percent of food imports and just 0.4 percent of foreign food facilities in 2011. Import-related outbreaks - like the 81 people sickened by Mexican cucumbers just a couple months ago - have become even more frequent in recent years. The foodborne pathogens that make it to our tables often prove deadly for children, the elderly, and those with compromised immune systems. In 2008, after undergoing chemotherapy and radiation, 67-year-old Raul Rivera was told by his oncologist that he would likely survive non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. He celebrated by taking his family out for dinner, where they ate pico de gallo. It was later discovered that the jalapeños in the salsa were imported from a Mexican farm that had used Salmonella-tainted water for irrigation. Rivera died two weeks later, not of cancer but of salmonellosis. In January 2011, President Obama signed the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), a set of sweeping reforms that would be fleshed out in rules issued by the FDA. Two and a half years later, only two proposed rules have been released - one on produce safety standards, and the other on preventive controls for human food. The FDA has drafted three other proposed rules that could significantly improve the safety of imports, but they are currently languishing at the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), an office inside the White House that is notorious for blocking, weakening, and delaying the rules that it reviews. These three rules, described below, are already many months beyond their statutory deadlines, and OIRA has held them well past the 90-day limit established by Executive Order 12866. Whenever these rules finally emerge, we should be alert to the ways that OIRA may have undermined their effectiveness, just as it substantially weakened the FDA's preventive-controls rule before it was released in February.