Source: POLITICO'S MORNING AGRICULTURE, 4/11/22

Food policy tends to take forever to roll out at FDA, sometimes decades. A new deep-dive from Pro Ag’s Helena Bottemiller Evich, published over the weekend, lays out the structural, cultural and political reasons for this dysfunction.

It’s a must-read. The package includes stunning visuals that help readers understand the big picture. Read it here.

A quick snippet: A monthslong POLITICO investigation found that regulating food is simply not a high priority at FDA, where drugs and medical products dominate, both in budget and bandwidth — a dynamic that’s only been exacerbated during the pandemic. Over the years, the food side of FDA has been so ignored and grown so dysfunctional that even former FDA commissioners readily acknowledged problems in interviews.

“The food program is on the back burner. To me, that’s problem No. 1,” said Stephen Ostroff, who twice served as acting commissioner and held several other senior roles at the agency, most recently as the top food official. When POLITICO called Ostroff for this story, he was so eager to discuss the agency’s problems that he prepared a laundry list of his concerns.

“There are a lot of things that languish,” Ostroff said. “There’s nobody really pushing very hard to get them done in the same way that you’re pushing very hard to get the Covid vaccines out there and authorized. We don’t have that imperative and that pressure to actually make things happen on the food side of the Food and Drug Administration.”

A quick rundown: The lengthy story focuses on three main areas where FDA has not taken timely action: setting ag water standards to keep deadly pathogens out of produce; reducing heavy metals in baby food; and cutting sodium across the food supply. (This is just a sampling of policies that have been on FDA’s to-do list for many, many years.)

Cliff Notes version: We really encourage you to read the full story, but if you are trying to get up to speed this morning, here’s a quick rundown of four key takeaways from the piece.

WASHINGTON REAX TO FDA DEEP-DIVE: The reaction to Helena’s piece over the weekend can be summed up like this: Those in food policy world are not surprised in the least. Those outside food world are shocked.

Senate: A couple key Democrats on Capitol Hill responded to the investigation. Senate HELP Chair Patty Murray (D-Wash.) noted that “this report shows that when it comes to food safety and nutrition, time after time the agency has been slow to act, and families have been left at risk for years.”

“It’s unacceptable that the agency has spent so long spinning their wheels when it comes to issues as important to families as the food they eat and feed [to] their loved ones,” Murray said. “I am going to be pressing for answers from FDA leadership on how they will fix this, and holding them accountable for doing so as quickly as possible.”

House: House Appropriations Chair Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) took to Twitter: “The 'F’ in FDA has come to mean 'failure’ on food safety. We must greatly intensify the pressure to get the FDA to do its job and to keep the American people safe and alive. The time for an overhaul of their priorities is now.”

A consumer advocate: “The results of this investigation are alarming and encapsulates the dysfunction that stakeholders have known for years,” Brian Ronholm, director of food policy at Consumer Reports, said in an email. “When a public health agency reaches the point where it seems to prioritize bureaucratic infighting and opaqueness over consumer protection, it becomes clear that changes in structure and personnel are necessary because people’s lives will depend on it.”

An industry voice: “The food industry wants and needs a strong FDA, but too often the root cause of many of the problems Politico documents so well is the increasing politicization of what is supposed to be an independent agency, leading to the sub-optimization of scientific evidence in decision-making and ineffective policies that do not advance public health, particularly when it comes to non-communicable diseases,” said Sean McBride, founder and principal of DSM Strategic Communications.