Community | March 14, 2009 | 4 comments

Obama Pledges to Improve Food Safety

source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/us/politics/15address.html?partner=rss

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Maggiekortchmar
Describing the government’s failure to inspect 95 percent of food-processing plants as “a hazard to the public health,” President Obama promised Saturday to bolster and reorganize the nation’s fractured food-safety system.


“In the end, food safety is something I take seriously, not just as your president, but as a parent,” Mr. Obama said in his weekly radio address.

A bipartisan chorus of powerful lawmakers in Congress has already promised to enact fundamental changes in the nation’s food-protection system. In his address, Mr. Obama made clear that he not only supports that legislative effort but may push to expand it.

A dozen federal agencies share responsibility for ensuring the safety of the nation’s food supply, a fractured oversight system that critics and government investigators have for years said needed major reforms.

A fierce debate has erupted on Capitol Hill in recent months about whether to bolster food oversight at the Food and Drug Administration or assign those responsibilities to a separate agency that would eventually absorb the food oversight duties of the other 11 agencies, including the Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety Inspection Service. Advocates on both sides of the issue have speculated for weeks about which approach the administration would support.

Those calling for a united food agency were heartened last month when Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said that a combined agency would make sense and that the massive recall of products made with tainted peanuts “is a grand opportunity for us to take a step back and rethink our approach.” These advocates also point out that the White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, has a basement apartment in the home of Representative Rosa DeLauro, a Connecticut Democrat who advocates putting the food functions at the F.D.A. into an independent agency.
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4 comments // Obama Pledges to Improve Food Safety

  • jawnybnsc
    • 0
      jawnybnsc  

    • Oh boy . . . more consultants and czars. How many more people can Obama put on the gravy train without having to bother with all that inconvenient nastiness of Senate Confirmation hearings. So where's all the outrage and complaining about the Balance of Power and the Constitution . . . or is all of that "principle" that so many of you showed when the opposition was in office no longer operative?

    • 3 years ago
  • Steven44
  • Ihatethemall
  • PressCore
    • 0
      PressCore  

    • Food safety involves a whole lot more these days than inspections. Monsanto/DuPont,the 2 most disgraceful American based corporations are still at large experimenting on the people of India and Africa
      with their transgenic contamination of food crops. Prince Charles has spoken out against them for all the economic & food manipulation they've used to profit from mass suicides of farmers they've harmed.Their corporate Fascists prey on the poor to gain totalitarian Monopoly over their food supply and the means of production. What about food safety for them ? How can any country have credibility amongst the community of the world's nations if they can't practice what they preach ? One of our current.com
      citizen journalists contributed a news story about how
      these 2 corporations are now targeting Afghanistan for their crimes against humanity. My God. I've lived long enough to see this Vietnam syndrome happen all over again. in Vietnam they were "bogged down" and used Dupont's napalm and agent orange to harm innocent people for profit. They didn't care about how many of our citizens they condemned to Veteran's Hospitals either. Do you remember how the Vietnam war ended ? I'm not surprised that 95 % of the food
      isn't inspected though the Food & Drug act was passed 105 years ago. I helped my Sicilian grandfather grow our own food as a teen. I know how to inspect my own food. And I don't trust the unnatural.

    • 3 years ago
  • cerealforeal
  • 1percent
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