Clinton tightens foreign produce policy

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    President Clinton signed a directive Thursday which would ban produce from foreign countries from entering the United States if it doesn’t meet U.S. standards.

    Taking the first step in a broad plan to get safer produce into American kitchens, President Clinton today proposed barring fruits and vegetables from countries that don’t meet U.S. safety standards.

    “With these efforts, we can make sure that no fruits or vegetables cross our borders, enter our ports or reach our dinner tables without meeting the same strict standards as those grown here in America,” Clinton said in a Rose Garden ceremony.

    BYU Dining Services has stringent standards when purchasing produce. They look for the most reputable sellers before going for the best bid.

    “We go out to bid for it each week,” Paul Johnson (P.J.), assistant director of Dining Services, said, “Bid sheets are given to us by our produces houses weekly.”

    “We are dealing with reputable companies. We go by reputation first, then we compare prices,” he said.

    “Most of the produce comes from California., and when it becomes off season we go down further south to Mexico,” he said.

    Produce bought from Mexico during winter are mainly strawberries and lettuce. When shipments come in they are inspected again to make sure good produce is not covering bad produce.

    “We inspect and wash it as it comes in. Our receiving men have instructions to randomly pull boxes and check the produce, Johnson said.

    Clinton said he will ask Congress next year for money for the Food and Drug Administration to hire a large corps of inspectors to examine produce safety abroad. He said that countries that block FDA inspections should not sell their produce here.

    The president also said he will direct federal health and agriculture officials to work with U.S. farmers to develop new sanitation guidelines for domestic produce. He ordered guidelines developed within a year.

    “Our food safety system is the strongest in the world, and that’s how it’s going to stay,” he said.

    Clinton didn’t offer specifics of the proposed legislation, but an administration official said the bill would seek up to $24 million for new FDA international inspections.

    The new agricultural guidelines, which would be crop-specific to help build safety into production here and abroad, could be wide-ranging. They might call for certifying that fields are irrigated with clean water, hiring farm workers free of such diseases as hepatitis and ensuring manure used as fertilizer is free of E. coli bacteria, said an official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

    A Mexican farm official denounced the plan.

    “It is very clear to us that behind all this are economic interests which want to prevent Mexican vegetables from entering the U.S.,” said Luis Cardenas, of an agriculture group in the Mexican state of Sinaloa, a big tomato producer.

    Other critics charge that Clinton is adopting the new program in an attempt to disarm those who say his push for free-trade legislation would increase the risks of tainted foods entering the country. They argue that the U.S. food supply already is the world’s safest.

    “Clearly, being the world food police complicates the trade environment we operate in,” said John Aguirre of the United Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Association. Risks from overseas produce are low enough that “this is unwarranted,” he added.

    The FDA, which has been pushing for the changes since 1993, said its inspection program hasn’t kept pace.

    “The whole infrastructure of food safety needs to be strengthened,” Associate Commissioner William Hubbard said.

    FDA figures show that because of budget constraints, its inspections of domestic food supplies plummeted from 21,000 in 1981 to just 5,000 last year. Foreign food imports have doubled to 2.2 million shipments a year since 1992, while FDA border inspections were cut in half. A mere 2 percent of imported food is sampled for contamination at the docks.

    From 1973 through 1987, tainted produce accounted for just 2 percent of disease outbreaks in which the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention identified a food culprit – a proportion that jumped to 5 percent of outbreaks from 1988 through 1991.

    Then doctors uncovered pathogens previously unknown in produce, like the cyclospora in Guatemalan raspberries that sickened some 1,400 Americans this spring and the E. coli that contaminated unpasteurized U.S. apple juices.

    There is no evidence that imports are more dangerous than U.S.-grown produce, said Morris Potter, CDC’s assistant director of foodborne diseases. “The concern is arising now because imports are on the rise.”

    Last year, 38 percent of fruits and 12 percent of vegetables consumed in the United States came from other countries, double 1986.

    Under the Clinton plan, FDA inspectors would check foreign food-safety systems and ban imported fruits and vegetables from countries that don’t regulate strictly enough, said an administration official.

    Such authority is identical to the Agriculture Department’s practice of regulating meat imports.

    These practices have caused friction with some U.S. trading partners, particularly the European Union, and a crackdown on foreign produce conceivably could cause tensions as well.

    Key to the produce plan would be “good agricultural practices” that can build safety into a crop. In the case of the Guatemalan raspberries, it is not known how they were tainted with the parasite cyclospora.

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