The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has finalized a set of groundbreaking food safety rules for produce farms and importable goods to strengthen its food safety system.
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Fresh produce growth on farms will be more strictly regulated by the FDA.
Many outbreaks related to both imported and homegrown produce have been recorded in the United States in recent years.
Standards in the Produce Safety rule include requirements for water quality, employee health and hygiene, wild and domesticated animals, biological soil amendments of animal origin (such as compost and manure), and equipment, tools, and buildings.
A store worker removes bags of salad mix containing fresh spinach September 15, 2006 at United Market in San Rafael, California. The source of an E. coli outbreak linked to bagged fresh spinach that spread to 20 states, sickening 90 people was identified by the FDA as distributor Natural Selection Foods/Earthbound Farm based in San Juan Bautista, California, according to media reports. The FDA has released a new set of rules to make sure that contaminated food is kept away from all USA households, Healthday reports. After outbreaks of cyclospora illnesses linked to imported cilantro, American investigators found toilet paper and human feces in Mexican fields where cilantro is grown.
The agency has haggled over how to write the rules since Congress approved them in 2010, trying to find a balance between food safety and regulating farms with safety measures already in place. Effective 60 days after publication in the Federal Register, the rules establish final compliance dates ranging from one to three years depending on business size, type and other factors.
Compared with the original proposal, the final rule requires less stringent standards for irrigation water quality and reduces the frequency of testing, in a few cases. The new rules formalize industry accountability and best practices for food importers and the produce community.
Hillary Thesmar, FMI VP of Food Safety Programs, said FDA’s rule should support rather than supplant global food safety practices. The FDA also issued guidelines governing the accreditation of third-party auditors to conduct food safety audits on foreign food facilities. To prevent potentially harmful food from reaching US consumers, the FDA can require in specific circumstances that a food offered for import be accompanied by a certification from an accredited third-party certification body. Acting Commissioner Stephen Ostroff said in congressional testimony this fall that getting those dollars over the next budget year is crucial to ensure the rules work as intended.
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The act, which was signed into law in 2011, is the “most sweeping reform” on laws on food safety since the 1970s as it shifts policies from contamination response to prevention.
