WASHINGTON -- Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said Feb. 10 that he favors a single food safety agency, but has not decided whether it should be located in the Agriculture Department's Food Safety and Inspection Service, the FDA or an independent agency.
Reacting to the outbreak of illnesses from products containing salmonella-tainted peanuts, Vilsack told the U.S. Rice Federation that food safety is both a human health and market issue.
"We are the only industrial nation to have two systems," Vilsack said, a reference to USDA's responsibility for meat, poultry and eggs and FDA's responsibility for most other food products.
Vilsack pointed out that USDA buys peanuts and peanut-containing products for the school lunch program and said the agency had been fortunate that "no child was harmed." USDA has suspended and proposed to debar the Peanut Corp. of America and its subsidiary Tidewater Blanching L.L.C., the suppliers of tainted peanut butter peanut paste, from doing business with the federal government, but Vilsack indicated that could have happened much faster if food safety was unified.
Adding that every American mother now thinks twice when she uses peanut butter to prepare foods for her children, Vilsack asked the rice growers, "How would you like to be in the peanut business today?" He continued, "At the end of the day, (food safety) is about preserving the income opportunities for farmers and ranchers."
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Ensuring safe food supply
Noting that 325,000 Americans go to hospitals every year for treatment of food-borne illnesses and that "millions" of others have food-borne illnesses that don't require treatment, Vilsack said, "We've got to make sure the food supply is safe. That's how you preserve markets."
Vilsack's statements in recent days in favor of a single food safety agency have come as something of a surprise to lawmakers and lobbyists because agribusiness has opposed it vigorously in the past and the job of reorganizing the food safety system has seemed so daunting.
House Agriculture Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman Rosa De Lauro, D-Conn., has long been an advocate of a single food safety agency, but her current bill would take the food safety responsibilities out of FDA and create a separate food safety division within Health and Human Services. In a letter to Vilsack Feb. 10, De Lauro and Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., noted that Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, has been called for a single food safety agency and that they "agree with this approach" and have introduced legislation in previous sessions of Congress to unify the government's food safety activities in a single agency.
