THE TOOTHLESS FDA

THE TOOTHLESS FDA. Perhaps melamine could be used to make it some dentures? The recent pet death debacle has taught us that melamine is a fairly routine ingredient in Chinese animal fodder, added to raise the apparent protein contents of the fodder and therefore its price. This has caused concern in the United States and not only among pet owners. Currently this fodder and other adulterated foodstuffs can enter the United States through any legal border crossing, but the number of food inspectors the Food And Drug Administration (FDA) employs has dropped back to the pre-911 levels, after a short upswing caused by fears of terrorist attacks on the food chain. Thus

About 99 percent of imported foods are simply acknowledged by computer and waved ashore.

Combine this lack of resources and the FDA's impotence in making food recall demands with global food markets and what do you get? You get melamine in the pet food and possibly even in the food fed to animals that are later consumed as meat. This is because the individual Chinese firms can increase their profits by adding melamine (and earlier urea) to fodder to make it seem of a higher quality. What to do about all this? Well, the FDA is enforcing a new import alert which authorizes its inspectors to detain ingredients which might contain melamine. But this is unlikely to be sufficient, given the large number of possible entry points and the small number of available inspectors. The dilemma is not just about toothless enforcement and the Chinese market incentives. The wider dilemma is about global food markets with varying national levels of food safety regulations and oversight, combined with the current U.S. administration's belief in unregulated markets as self-correcting. Yet it is hard to see how the markets would self-correct without any regulatory incentives unless a sizeable number of human deaths first occurs. Perhaps the conservatives can be talked over to the pro-regulation camp when it is pointed out that our food chain has been left open for possible terrorist attacks? --J. Goodrich