New U.S. bioterror rules loom for food firms
 

Reuters, 12.09.03, 6:47 PM ET

 By Michael Christie

 

MIAMI (Reuters) - New bioterrorism measures that force food and beverage suppliers to the U.S. market to register with the government will jack up food costs and could wreak havoc with supplies, industry officials said Tuesday.

 

With only 100,000 of an estimated 400,000 suppliers having registered before Friday's deadline, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has given domestic and foreign companies four more months to comply with the new rules drawn up as a result of the Sept. 11 attacks.

But once the grace period expires, U.S. food supplies could be thrown into chaos if suppliers to big U.S. food firms are blackballed by the FDA.

"This four-month honeymoon phase is going to be a real wake-up call to those companies that don't understand this actually impacts them," said Mari Stull, director of international regulatory policy at the Grocery Manufacturers Association of America, which represents $500 billion in food sales.

"And it's going to be a real wake-up call to some of the big companies here in the United States that haven't been really sure that their supply chain is complying," Stull told Reuters at a conference in Miami on trade with the Caribbean and Central America.

The new FDA regulations will require all foreign food companies exporting to the United States, and all domestic producers, to register with the agency.

They will also have to give advance notice of food and beverage shipments, and will eventually have to comply with strict record-keeping rules that have yet to be drawn up.

The regulations do not cover meat, poultry and egg products as those have been subject to strict domestic and international inspection by the Department of Agriculture's public health regulatory agency for years.

TESTING BIOTERRORISM "AGENTS"

Elsa Murano, undersecretary for food safety at the USDA, said the authorities were as confident as they could be that they had all the necessary monitoring in place to ensure the security of meat, poultry and eggs supplies from the 33 countries allowed to sell those products in the United States.

In addition to having inspectors in all food processing plants, requiring other countries to have an equivalent system of food safety, doing international audits and spot inspections at ports of entry, the USDA has begun testing for another 12 "agents" that could be used by bioterrorists, Murano said.

She declined to identify the agents.

"If you really want to do something, you can. If you really have your mind set, you can do it. But if we make it very, very difficult, very inconvenient, very easy to get discovered, that's really our mind-set," she told Reuters in Miami.

While supportive of U.S. needs to protect its food supplies, Caribbean and Central American businessmen and officials attending the conference in Miami said they were concerned about the new FDA regulations.

The laws could place stiff cost burdens on small producers and force them to upgrade computer systems and train staff, said Samaroo Dowlath, chief executive of Trinidad and Tobago's National Agricultural Marketing and Development Corporation.

The measures will most likely also increase the cost of food in the United States, and perhaps change the selection of food available on U.S. supermarket shelves, said Miguel Garcia Winder of the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture.

 

"And who is going to pay for this? Consumers are going to pay," Garcia Winder told a panel at the conference hosted by trade advocacy group Caribbean Central American Action.