A Washington Post editorial on Tuesday called for the Food and Drug Administration to develop a system "to trace food and produce from the farm to the dinner table." Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Colo., has called for such a system but has yet to get anything passed by the House. She introduced a bill last year that would require the FDA to develop a system to track meat products, but the bill hasn’t gone anywhere. She also tried, as the Post editorial points out, to get a provision in the 2008 Food and Drug Administration Globalization Act to require the agency to build a system to track food.
When Congress starts mandating technology solutions to problems it can create headaches for agencies. One needs to look no further than the U.S. VISIT system to know what not to do when writing technology solutions into law.
In 2001, shortly after the terrorist attacks, Congress passed the USA Patriot Act, which required (what would eventually become) the Homeland Security Department to build an entry-exit tracking system to identify foreign travelers coming into the country and when they left. The law set down some tight deadlines, such as the system was to be operational in 115 airports and 14 major seaports in less than two years. There were others. DHS met the deadlines for the entry part of the system, but it is still trying (nearly seven years later) to develop the exit part of the system, which could cost billions of dollars to build from scratch. The system has been a disappointment for Congress and the Government Accountability Office.
Another problem with US VISIT was that Congress' expectations of what technology could do, and an agency's ability to manage it, may have been too high. In typical fashion, members of Congress didn’t call any federal information technology specialists (chief information officers were pretty new back then) to the Hill to testify about what was technologically doable and what wasn't. Granted the atmospherics on the Hill were wild given the terrorist attacks had occurred just weeks prior; members felt they had to act quickly. But some realism would have helped the cause.
Let's hope Congress doesn’t over prescribe what a food tracking system should do – at least not before talking to FDA IT managers. But there's at least one sign that FDA has a good start. The agency already is working on a food tracking system, Stephen Sundlof, director of the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition at FDA,
FDA plans to launch a pilot in six states to test how it can trace back contaminated foods, Sundlof added. If the provision for a food tracking system is added to the FDA globalization act, what that language says or doesn’t could help determine how successful such an IT system would be.
COMMENTS
The FDA only regulates wild game such as red deer, all other meat is regulated by USDA.
Ronald Colucci 07/10/08 08:40 am ET