Food Protection Trends - November 2010 - 676

Ivan Parkin Lecture
Improving Food Safety from Farm to Table: A Prevention-, Science-, and Risk-based Approach Grounded in Partnership
Deputy Commissioner for Foods U.S. Food and Drug Administration Washington, D.C.
t’s a great pleasure to be here at your annual conference and a great honor to be selected to deliver this year’s Ivan Parkin Lecture. IAFP and this conference play important roles in the food safety community, and we are all grateful for that. I’m honored to be back at FDA, working with many great colleagues. Over the last 10 years in academia, I spent a lot of time thinking about ways our food safety system can be strengthened. Being back at FDA, with responsibility for implementing the paradigm shift to comprehensive prevention as the hallmark of the system, I’ve been reminded how much easier it is to generate ideas than to put them into practice. But we are on our way, and I’m very glad to be able to share with you some of what we are doing at FDA, how FDA envisions making a difference in food safety, and the reliance we place on partnership with the food safety community, including IAFP.

Michael R. Taylor

I

prevention paradigm national policy and give FDA new authorities to make it happen. The legislation is important for many reasons, and we remain optimistic that it will pass this year. But there is much we can and will do to make progress on prevention as Congress does its work.

How Food Gets Safer
Let me set the stage by asking two basic questions: How does food get safer, and how does FDA contribute to food getting safer? At a high level, the answers are simple. First, food gets safer when everyone all across the food system does their part to prevent problems. We all know that most of the actions that directly affect food safety aren’t government actions, but rather the actions of agricultural producers, food processors, transporters, retailers, and consumers. This just reflects the fact that opportunities to prevent problems lie at every step along the farm-to-table chain and that food safety solutions ultimately have to be implemented by the private sector and be food system solutions. At FDA, we see ourselves playing a unique role in the system as a science-based, public health regulatory agency. Our core job is not to make food safe ourselves, but to set modern, preventionoriented food safety standards and ensure high rates of compliance with them. It sounds simple, but we all know it’s not, and we can’t be successful in our role without a robust set of partnerships across the food system. At a government level, we have to continue building strong partnerships with our state and local counterparts and the national integrated food safety system that the President’s Food Safety Working Group calls for. In addition, we have to work closely with private entities throughout the food system.

Opportune Time for Progress
This is a great time to make significant progress. We have broad political, stakeholder and expert consensus on the need to modernize the food safety system and on the broad principles that should guide the system. These principles are familiar to most of us. We need a system that is prevention oriented − the key to public health and public confidence. It must be science − and risk-based − which is essential to being effective and efficient in reducing foodborne illness. The system must address food safety comprehensively − from farm-to-table, and it must hold imports to the same standards we set for domestic facilities. Legislation is pending in Congress that embraces these principles. It would make the science-based

FDA’s Reliance on Partnerships—Farm to Table
The best way to back up these assertions − and give you a sense of FDA’s food safety agenda − is a whirlwind tour of the farm-to-table spectrum and things FDA is planning and doing to implement the prevention paradigm.

676 FOOD PROTECTION TRENDS | NOVEMBER 2010
Food Protection Trends - November 2010

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Food Protection Trends - November 2010
