The FDA Finally Releases Firm Safety Standards For Domestic And Imported Food

So here are the basics: In 2010, the Food Safety Modernization Act, or FSMA, was passed by Congress, and early in 2011, was signed into law by President Obama. It is a bill designed to impose rules and regulations on both food producers and food importers specifically to cut down on the amount of food-borne illness in this country, which kills about 3,000 people each year. On Friday, the FDA, which is in charge of implementing the FSMA, released the finalized rules. Yeah, it took a few years. Government, right?

The newly released rules (the ones we haven’t really seen before) are in three parts. Here’s what they are.

The Produce Safety rule is aimed at domestic producers. It’s an overarching set of rules about how farms should be run, specifically aimed at produce. (Yes, chicken is a major carrier of, for example, salmonella, but so are cucumbers, spinach, and peanuts.) The rules cover hygiene from seed to store: water quality, employee hygiene, equipment, compost, manure, cleanliness of the facilities, everything. If you’re curious, you can read all of them here.

The Foreign Supplier Verification Programs rule attempts, basically, to ensure that all imported food meets the same standards that are set for domestic food. Imported food accounts for about 19 percent of all food in the US, including 52 percent of all fresh fruit, so this isn’t a small deal. The rule will be applied through the establishment of the third new part, which is…

New Accredited Third-Party Verification. This is farming out some of the actual monitoring to approved groups. You can look at it the same way as some of the common labels you’d see on coffee or eggs: There are non-governmental groups that verify whether something is “Fair Trade Certified” or “Rainforest Alliance Certified.” Except: those certifications have their own rules, and the ones that the FDA will be accrediting will be using the FDA’s rules set in the Foreign Supplier Verification Programs. (BTW, for more about coffee labeling, check this out.)

This isn’t the end of the work on FSMA; with these three, the FDA has officially finalized five of the seven major rules that make up the bill. But these are hugely important, perhaps the most important of the entire bill, and they are, at long last, done.

Correction: This article previously referred to the acronym of the Food Safety Modernization Act incorrectly as FDMA, rather than FSMA.