OrlandoSentinel.com
U.S. Rep Adam H. Putnam
During the past few months, the American food supply has been rocked, yet again, by an incident of food-borne illness. This time, the culprit — salmonella-contaminated peanut butter — has infected more than 600 people, reaching into almost every state in the union. It is an unfortunate reminder of how badly our food-safety laws need reform.

Last week, Congressman Jim Costa, a California Democrat, and I introduced a bipartisan bill with broad-based support, the Safe Food Enforcement, Assessment, Standards and Targeting Act, or Safe FEAST Act, to modernize our food-safety network to ensure the highest level of food-safety standards for our nation’s food supply.

This latest incident is one more reminder of the vulnerabilities in our food supply and the urgent need for Congress to pass legislation to fix the system. In January, the Government Accountability Office, which is the federal government’s nonpartisan watchdog, again listed food safety in its biennial “High Risk” report highlighting the areas of the federal government with the most immediate need for attention and reform.

There are currently 15 agencies sharing jurisdiction over at least 30 food-related laws. Additionally, according to GAO, the Food and Drug Administration oversees 80 percent of our nation’s food supply, but its expenditures account for less than a quarter of the food-safety budget. This patchwork system of governance exacerbates an already outdated and inefficient food-safety system, leaving American seniors, families and children at grave risk. It is an example of Washington bureaucracy at its worst.

The GAO’s findings should not surprise anyone, since the peanut butter salmonella outbreak follows a long list of massive recalls over the past several years, including tomatoes, peppers, cantaloupes, spinach and lettuce. The system is so backward that upstanding industries are occasionally punished by mistake. Last year’s tomato recall cost tomato growers in Florida and throughout the United States hundreds of millions of dollars in sales, even though the real culprit turned out to be jalapeño peppers from Mexico.

The Safe FEAST Act builds on legislation that Costa and I introduced in the previous Congress. Our bill would place new mandatory food-safety requirements on food companies domestically and abroad while also requiring them to conduct food-safety-risk analyses to identify potential problems as well as outline appropriate safety controls. It would also give FDA statutory power for the first time to recall contaminated food, which is authority FDA has long sought from Congress.

Furthermore, the bill strengthens coordination between federal, state, and foreign food-safety efforts and provides tools for more effectively monitoring high-risk products.

I hope my colleagues in the House and Senate will listen to the repeated warnings and finally get serious about food-safety reform. The Safe FEAST Act represents a bipartisan, pragmatic approach to addressing this critical problem.

There are a number of pressing items on Congress’ plate right now, but that is no excuse for procrastination. We need to work together on this issue to ensure the integrity of this vital system and restore people’s confidence in the safety of what they are putting on their supper tables every night.

U.S. Rep. Adam H. Putnam represents the 12th Congressional District of Florida, which includes portions of Osceola, Polk and Hillsborough counties.

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