The FDA cannot inspect its way to a safe global food supply

Two major outbreaks involving imported produce have again tested Americans’ confidence in the safety of their food. A multistate cyclospora outbreak linked to iceberg lettuce from central Mexico sickened 9,481 people. A salmonella outbreak linked to jalapeño peppers from Sinaloa has sickened 345 people and triggered numerous downstream recalls.

In a country divided on nearly everything, there should be nothing controversial about this: Americans deserve safe food, regardless of where it is produced. The question is how best to ensure it. 

Americans expect fresh fruits, vegetables and seafood year-round. Meeting that demand requires importing enormous quantities of food through increasingly complex global supply chains. Our food-safety system needs to adapt. 

One longstanding element of the Food and Drug Administration’s imported-food safety strategy relies on a surprisingly old-fashioned approach: sending American investigators around the world to inspect individual foreign food-processing facilities. It is the regulatory equivalent of the Lone Ranger riding into town to handle the problem himself. It is also wildly ineffective.

Congress reinforced that approach with the Food Safety Modernization Act. The foreign-inspection target eventually reached 19,200 facilities annually — a level the FDA itself has called unrealistic and unachievable. The agency has proven itself right many times over.

According to a 2025 Government Accountability Office report, the FDA averaged just 917 foreign food-safety inspections annually from fiscal 2018 through 2023 — less than 5 percent of its target. Even in 2019, when the agency conducted 1,727 inspections, it reached only about 9 percent of the target. 

The predictable response is to call for more inspectors, more money and more inspections. But that misses the larger problem. The FDA is relying too heavily on a model that no amount of additional staffing can make scalable.

Imports account for about 15 percent of the U.S. food supply, including 32 percent of fresh........

© The Hill