FDA Sponsored Report Suggests Ways to Bolster Food Safety in Developing Countries
Persuading regulatory agencies and industry associations in developed nations to share their food and drug safety inspection results is among the steps recommended by a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) report on ways to boost the safety systems in developing countries. The FDA and its “technologically advanced “counterparts in the European Union, Canada, Japan, Norway, Iceland, Switzerland, Australia, and New Zealand should devise a system for mutual recognition of one another's inspections, which would eliminate the wasteful duplication of effort, the report said.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Export Compliance Daily combines U.S. export control news, foreign border import regulation and policy developments into a single daily information service that reliably informs its trade professional readers about important current issues affecting their operations.
The report recommends 13 steps that the FDA and other organizations can take over the next three to five years to strengthen the safety systems in developing nations. The FDA, the Department of Agriculture, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other agencies should provide technical expertise, training, and tools to strengthen the surveillance systems in developing countries, the report said. The agencies could provide this assistance directly or channel it through international organizations such as the World Health Organization. The FDA and the USDA also should provide incentives for businesses and academic groups to collaborate on developing inexpensive technologies that can be used in developing nations to prevent and detect fraud and provide tracking and verification of products along the supply chain.
Stressing the importance of international cooperation in building regulatory capacity in developing countries, the report suggested the U.S. work with Mexico, the host of the next meeting of the G20 nations, to add food and medical product safety to the G20 agenda. As an emerging manufacturing nation with a vigorous export economy, Mexico would be an ideal leader for a global initiative on food and medical product safety, the committee said.
More than 80 percent of active pharmaceutical ingredients and 40 percent of finished drugs come from abroad, as does 85 percent of the seafood consumed in America, the report said, citing federal estimates. Congress has charged FDA to inspect more foreign producers as the volume of imports grows, but given its modest budget, the agency cannot do its job well without substantial improvement in the capacity of its counterpart agencies in emerging economies, said the committee that wrote the report.
"The recommendations in this report represent the committee's consensus on how to best bridge the gaps in food and medical product regulatory systems in low- and middle-income countries," said committee chair Jim Riviere, director of the Center for Chemical Toxicology Research and Pharmacokinetics, College of Veterinary Medicine, North Carolina State University. "These are multisectoral recommendations that involve action from a variety of stakeholders. We believe that the changes we suggest could greatly improve the safety of food and medical products around the world."