As food safety requirements ramp up, industry leaders said the FDA’s treatment of foreign suppliers needs to be fair and use existing resources efficiently.
The U.S. Government Accountability Office report found that the FDA has failed to comply with foreign food facility inspection requirements in the FSMA. 
The law requires the FDA to inspect at least 600 foreign facilities in 2011. After that, the agency was supposed to inspect at least twice the number of facilities from the previous year for the next five years, the GAO report said.
U.S. reliance on imported food as a percentage of all food consumed has grown from about 9% in 2000 to more than 16% in 2011, according to the GAO report.
FDA officials told the GAO that the agency doesn’t plan to conduct significantly more than 1,200 inspections of foreign facilities a year, and it is hindered by lack of funding. The FDA also questions the usefulness of conducting that many inspections, according to the report.
The GAO countered in the report, asking the FDA to determine how many inspections are sufficient to ensure comparable safety of imported and domestic food. 
If that differs from the FSMA numbers, the FDA should report the results to Congress and recommend appropriate changes, the GAO said. 
The GAO report said the FDA doesn’t have adequate performance measures to determine if its foreign offices are helping improve food safety.
“GAO continues to believe that such a plan for the foreign offices is critical to FDA’s ability to address staffing challenges, especially since 44% of foreign office positions were vacant as of October 2014,” the report said. Final regulations requiring foreign supplier verification programs and establishing an accredited third-party audit program will be published this year. Those rules give importers more responsibility in ensuring suppliers produce safe food, the FDA told the GAO.The FDA needs to work with food safety officials in exporting countries, said Lance Jungmeyer, president of the Fresh Produce Association of the Americas, Nogales, Ariz.
“In order for FDA to truly accomplish the kinds of inspections that are required under FSMA, there needs to be a cooperative agreement between FDA and (Mexican food safety agency) SENASICA to trust the Mexican food safety inspectors to conduct certain activities that meet the standards of FDA’s expectations,” Jungmeyer said. “That is the best way to take advantage of existing resources to be most efficient.”
Robert Guenther, senior vice president of public policy at United Fresh Produce Association, said FDA must be even-handed in the way they treat foreign farms and facilities compared with domestic farms and facilities. 
“As FSMA comes into mandatory requirements, it is going to be essential that FDA requires the same requirement on domestic growers and facilities are also being adhered to with product coming in form other countries,” Guenther said. 
“That will be critical to the success of FSMA.”
Jungmeyer said the FPAA has several meetings each year with FDA’s Mexico City office and said the staff seems to be knowledgeable and dedicated, but staff turnover is a concern.
“Despite the turnover, FPAA has been able to work with FDA’s Mexico City (office) on some ongoing projects, including helping FDA map out which produce come from which growing regions and to define the seasonality within those regions,” Jungmeyer said.
That relationship has helped FDA respond more efficiently when there is concern about a particular item, he said.
Jungmeyer said a bigger issue with FDA inspections in Mexico is the State Department has travel advisories in many regions, making it difficult for U.S. government employees to visit those areas.
“The ironic thing is foreign governments put out travel advisories for their own employees about visiting dangerous U.S. cities like New York City and Washington, D.C.,” he said.  “Yet you’ll never see FDA barred from visiting their own backyard in the nation’s capitol.”