Washington Insider: Rep. DeLauro Hits FDA Delays in Water Quality Enforcement

Finding and fixing water quality problems for leafy greens is one of the industry’s major problems, but leaders at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) charged with implementing the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) knew that all along, Food Safety News is reporting this week. As a result, they decided to allow “more time for education and training” for the new rules. The original 2018 compliance date for the FSMA water quality standards was pushed back to 2022 and FDA called in 45 state agricultural departments to help get growers and others in the food supply chain up to speed. But this week, after FDA released embarrassing findings from its investigation into last year’s E. coli outbreak linked to romaine lettuce, “the agency learned its patience has a price,” FSN says. One of the authors of the Food Safety Modernization Act who is still a congressional leader on food safety, Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., let FDA know “she’s seen enough delay.” “The FDA’s investigations into last year’s romaine lettuce recalls have confirmed what we already knew to be true: dirty irrigation water contaminates produce and makes people sick. The fact that people are dying and lives are being destroyed while the FDA caves to big corporate interests is unconscionable,” she said. She also called on FDA to “take its own findings to heart and implement science-based standards to test irrigation water. Eight years after the Food Safety Modernization Act was signed into law, it is long past time these important rules went into effect — not delayed into the next decade. Enough is enough,” she said. DeLauro’s criticisms are important to FDA and the food industry since she chairs the Congressional Food Safety Caucus and is a senior Democrat on the Agriculture Appropriations Subcommittee which has jurisdiction over funding and oversight of the FDA. She charges that the FDA has actually has done little “to advance real actions that would prevent food outbreaks in the first place,” FSN said. DeLauro noted that investigators positively identified the outbreak strain in the sediment of an irrigation reservoir on the implicated farm in Santa Maria in Santa Barbara County, Calif. “These findings build upon FDA’s Environmental Assessment into last year’s E. coli outbreak linked to romaine lettuce produced in the Yuma growing region. That investigation also positively identified the outbreak strain in contaminated irrigation water, which was found in three separate locations along an irrigation canal used by multiple farms. Together, both outbreaks resulted in 272 illnesses, 121 hospitalizations, and 5 deaths” the congresswoman said. Despite scientific evidence that contaminated agricultural irrigation water poses serious risks to produce safety, the FDA is continuing to delay implementation of the Produce Safety Rule’s testing requirements of agricultural water under the FSMA. The original compliance date was set for 2018. However, under current policy, FDA will not begin any enforcement of the water testing rules until at least 2022. DeLauro has a strong reputation as a well-informed, formidable critic of federal agencies, as well as of industry safety problems. She has made the case for some time that one of the food industry’s key areas of vulnerability is water quality, so the FDA’s willingness to move fairly slowly to shore up protections against a similar outbreak like those that hammered the industry last year is somewhat surprising. Certainly food safety is of vital importance to producers and this FDA-DeLauro fight is one that should be watched closely as it intensifies, Washington Insider believes.