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Global Risk: Can America Ensure the Safety of Imported Goods?

 

 

When Americans sit down to eat dinner, likely one of the last things on their minds is where the meal came from. The answer could get complicated. A simple plate of spaghetti could contain tomatoes and bell peppers from Mexico, onions and spices from India, noodles made with Canadian grain and, yes, beef from the good ol' U.S. of A.

When it comes to consumer products — from toys to tires to T-shirts — identifying the source country is easier. A tag says "Made in the U.S.A.," "A Product of France" or sometimes even "Hecho en Pakistan." But with so many goods from so many countries, most folks have no clue how their possessions were made, whether they were inspected thoroughly or even whom to ask.

But when toys of childhood icons like Barbie, Batman, Thomas the Tank Engine, Dora the Explorer, Big Bird and Elmo are yanked from stores and called dangerous, it's hard not to notice. 

"People used to think that buying the brand name, expensive toys was a seal of safety, but recent recalls have proven that false," says Cara Smith, deputy chief of staff for Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan.

Nancy Cowles, executive director of Kids in Danger, a Chicago-based nonprofit group that advocates for safer products for children, says the rash of recalls is making life difficult for parents and other caregivers because there are so many flawed products being discovered. An average of two products are withdrawn from the market every week, but there's no standard procedure for how recalls work. For example, some companies tell customers to bring the products back to the store, but others tell customers to throw the faulty products away, she says. 

Products from China are under particular scrutiny. Magnetix toys with super-strong magnets killed one 2-year-old from the Seattle area and landed 27 other kids in the hospital with intestinal injuries. A Minneapolis boy died last year after swallowing a heart-shaped charm from a Reebok bracelet that turned out to be 99 percent lead. In response to the American outcry over the recalls, Chinese officials announced in September that they would ban the use of lead paint on toys. 

The litany of tragic stories over the past year about Chinese products goes well beyond dangerous toys. It includes recalls of poisonous toothpaste, tainted seafood and tires that fall apart. China's products have accounted for the majority of all imported consumer product recalls, two-thirds of the 471 recalls in fiscal year 2006.

But China is not the only offender. In fact, when it comes to food and medical shipments, Mexico and India had more turned back at the border than China, according to congressional researchers. 

Domestic products, especially food, can be dangerous, too. Three people died and 199 more got sick last year from California spinach contaminated with E. coli. Another 425 suffered from salmonella traced back to Peter Pan peanut butter made in Georgia. And, this summer, eight people were hospitalized for botulism they apparently contracted from eating canned chili and hot dog sauce, also made in Georgia.

Those failures raise serious questions about the United States' ability to prevent dangerous products from getting into the homes of American consumers.

Budget cuts in the administrations of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush mean that two key agencies that focus on food and consumer product safety are dealing with a surge in imports with fewer inspectors. Plus, Democrats complain, the agencies don't have enough power, such as the authority to issue a recall on their own. 

Concern over product safety led President Bush last summer to pick a group of key members of his Cabinet to recommend improvements. 

A quick look at the roster of that panel shows how complicated the task can be. The secretaries of the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Health and Human Services, State and Transportation, plus the attorney general, are all on board. When it comes to just monitoring food, there are 12 federal agencies involved in enforcing 35 separate laws.

State and local authorities also play a role. For example, Illinois laws regarding lead poisoning and the safety of children's products give the attorney general authority to make sure retailers are pulling recalled toys from their shelves and posting notice of the danger.

Calls for stepped-up national testing and border inspections are increasing, especially because the U.S. Food and Drug Administration inspects just 1 percent of food coming into the country, down from 1.7 percent in 1996. 

The agency has about 625 inspectors for food and another 260 for medicines, but food enters the United States through 326 ports. By contrast, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which monitors meat imports, rechecks a fifth of those shipments in the 10 ports where meat is allowed to enter the United States.

But there are limits to how much inspection can be done.

"If you opened up every single shipment, it would be the end of our importation and global trade because we would literally have a line of container ships stretching from our ports all the way across the Atlantic and the Pacific; they wouldn't be getting in," Michael Chertoff, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security and a member of the presidential panel, said last summer.

U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt, who heads the presidential panel and the agency that includes the FDA, said the efforts of FDA inspectors at U.S. ports need to be better focused. The FDA monitors roughly 80 percent of the nation's food supply. Using random inspections at ports is like trying to find a needle in a haystack, Leavitt told reporters, but if regulators are smart they can "shrink the haystack."

Leavitt didn't give specifics, but one way to shrink the haystack would be to give the FDA additional powers to work with producers overseas.

In other industries, foreign companies can work with U.S. regulators to prove they're following safe manufacturing practices before shipping their products. U.S. authorities then know those products are less likely to be harmful. In return, the trusted importers have to go through fewer regulatory hassles when their goods arrive in American ports.

But the FDA doesn't have the authority to do the same thing. That makes it harder to focus its limited resources on troublesome products. The idea of giving the FDA similar power is gaining steam in Washington, D.C., especially as health officials stress the need to know how food is handled "from field to fork."

"Rather than remaining a primary line of defense where we rely on testing at the point of entry, the border needs to be a checkpoint to make sure foreign firms have complied with health and safety requirements imposed along the supply chain," Scott Gottlieb said at last summer's congressional hearing. 

Gottlieb is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank supporting business interests. 

The approach would jive with the health secretary's vision for the "system of the future."

"If a consumer desired it — it's quite possible that we could then begin, at some point, to be able to see where things were produced, when they were picked, when they were processed, how they were shipped, the day they were processed, when they went to the grocery store, when it went to the distributor, when the person picked it up out of the grocery counter and took it home," Leavitt says. 

"And if there's a problem, you could electronically notify them: You bought a can of X that had a problem on it, and here's what you can do."

That's a long way from the situation today. Although Congress passed a law in 2002 requiring foods to be labeled with their country of origin, those requirements haven't taken effect yet because of opposition from the food industry. 

The result is that not even food manufacturers necessarily know where their ingredients are from. 

While touring an FDA site in San Francisco, investigators for the U.S. House of Representatives witnessed the processing of wheat gluten from China. But the packaging for the 50-pound bags, including windmill logos, indicated it came from "Amsterdam-Holland." The investigators were told it was the importers' responsibility to tell its customers where the product came from; the agencies didn't have the authority.

Furthermore, the House team found that the FDA's decisions on which packages to inspect upon arrival were largely based on a computer program and the decisions at FDA headquarters — not the agents in the field. So the wheat proteins that went into the pet food that killed several cats and dogs and was recalled this year apparently were never inspected. 

Domestically, the agency relies almost entirely on volunteer compliance. Exceptions are fish, citrus juice, low-acid canned fruit and baby formula. The FDA declined to issue strict rules for handling lettuce, spinach and other leafy crops, even though those crops grown in the Salinas Valley in California led to 10 outbreaks of food poisoning in the past 11 years, the investigators noted.

The counterpart to the FDA for consumer products is an obscure federal agency called the Consumer Product Safety Commission. It regulates more than 15,000 types of products, everything from kitchen stoves to bikes to bibs.

The imports the commission regulates were worth $614 billion in 2006, with Chinese products accounting for 40 percent of that tally. In fact, China quadrupled its share of the American import market between 1997 and 2004. But Chinese products also are far and away the most likely to be recalled.

"These imports have strained the agency's resources and challenge us to find new ways to work to ensure the safety of imported products that enter the stream of commerce," the agency's acting director, Nancy Nord, told a Senate panel.

Like the FDA, the product safety commission must oversee the continued growth of imported products with fewer investigators and outdated equipment. 

It now has 401 employees, down from a high in 1980 of 978. 

Its authority also is limited. It can only order a recall in cooperation with the product's manufacturer. And no federal law punishes retailers who sell products once they've been recalled.

U.S. Sen. Richard Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, has frequently criticized the agency for not taking a more aggressive stance against Chinese importers with faulty products.

"What we're seeing is two different sets of standards that are putting our children at risk," Durbin said after meeting with toy retailers in Chicago. 

"China has been trying to calm anxieties by noting that 99 percent of their toys are safe. Ninety-nine percent just won't do it when we're talking about the safety of our children. We need an agreement on a set of comprehensive safety standards and a [Consumer Product Safety Commission] that is up to the task of protecting consumers rather than diminishing expectations and reducing its role."

Durbin wants toys, clothing, car seats and all other products designed for kids 5 and under to be certified by an outside company, just as Underwriters Laboratories Inc. does for electronics. Others have suggested that food imports should be handled the same way.

Anita Weinberg, the director of Loyola University's child law policy and legislative programs, suggests that lead paint should be banned outright in the United States. That type of law would send a clear signal to foreign manufacturers to not use the paint at all. But, Weinberg acknowledges, the ban could be tough to enforce. For example, she says, even Mattel Inc. believed it had imported toys that were free of lead paint until it discovered otherwise. 

Apart from regulatory changes, there's also hope the market will punish unscrupulous manufacturers. 

"This is a case where you can't entirely rely on enlightened self-interest, but it would be a mistake to overlook the very powerful tool that the marketplace gives you in driving quality," said Chertoff, the homeland security secretary.

"I think a lesson that American firms have learned over the years — which I suspect is being learned now around the world — is that it doesn't take very much to trash a brand. And once you've destroyed your brand, you've done yourself a lot of damage. And I think that's a lesson that's getting increasing velocity these times".

Concern over product safety led President Bush last summer to pick a group of key members of his Cabinet to recommend improvements.


Daniel C. Vock is a reporter for Washington, D.C.-based Stateline.org. He notes that information on product safety can be found at recalls.gov.

Illinois Issues, October 2007

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