Rodolfo Paiz Offline Upload & Sell: On
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Wrei wrote:
Rodolfo, while I agree we need a safe food chain, judging from my experience with gov't inspectors, we would be better off if the gov't turned food processing validations and verifications over to a third party vs. the gov't. The 3rd party along with the industry would set the standards and regulations. The commercial 3rd party would have a "stake" in the game and be responsible for assuring the process and deliverable is of a measured, standardized quality.
Ideally, yes. But in the case of the FDA, that's actually how it's been for years. Food producers must be audited once a year by a third party. But the problem is that such a system depends on someone being able to verify a statistically-significant sample of the population every year, and then verify every producer's conditions at least once every X years (say, every 10 years). The FDA is so underfunded and woefully disorganized that it is utterly and pathetically unable to do that: their internal inspection staff is some absurdly low number like 4,000 total inspectors IIRC.
And so the economic incentive is to game the system: since the FDA isn't going to show up on someone's doorstep, and since the auditors are paid by the producers, then many (most?) audits are either pencil-whipped or just fabricated out of thin air. And then people die.
The current system doesn't need to be reinvented, it's already running along the lines you suggest. But it does need much improvement, specifically IMHO: the FDA's capability to spot-check and verify needs to get a lot better; the FDA's teeth to impose fines or penalties, or even shut someone down, need to get a lot bigger and sharper; and the "paper trail" that tells us where contaminated food came from needs to get a lot more complete.
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