- Jan 20, 2001
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Serious question for Bush supporters . . .
How can you support a man that has made America LESS secure in fiscal, political, and real terms? Does it bother you that food safety inspections have lagged due to lack of funding ($100m or so), but Bush is about to ask for $100 BILLION for the Iraq Civil War?
CNN
1) contamination in the field (poo, pesticides)
2) contamination during processing
3) improper processing . . . it's not the same as #2 . . . it's possible to do everything right and still have a problem
4) improper storage
How can you support a man that has made America LESS secure in fiscal, political, and real terms? Does it bother you that food safety inspections have lagged due to lack of funding ($100m or so), but Bush is about to ask for $100 BILLION for the Iraq Civil War?
CNN
Here's the kicker . . . even if you assume Al Qaeda thinks attacking the food supply isn't spectacular enough. We NEED to protect our food supply from a variety of homegrown problems:Between 2003 and 2006, FDA food safety inspections dropped 47 percent, according to a database analysis of federal records by The Associated Press.
That's not all that's dropping at the FDA in terms of food safety. The analysis also shows:
? There are 12 percent fewer FDA employees in field offices who concentrate on food issues.
? Safety tests for U.S.-produced food have dropped nearly 75 percent, from 9,748 in 2003 to 2,455 last year, according to the agency's own statistics.
1) contamination in the field (poo, pesticides)
2) contamination during processing
3) improper processing . . . it's not the same as #2 . . . it's possible to do everything right and still have a problem
4) improper storage
Hmm, an actual problem that can be solved by throwing more money at it yet what does Bush want . . . bury cash in the desert.The Bush administration's budget request for 2008 includes an additional $10.6 million for food safety at the FDA; the lobbying group said 10 times that increase is needed. Even though the FDA increased its overall spending on food between 2003 and 2006, those increases failed to keep pace with rising personnel costs.
"It's not just outsiders like us who have been watching it for a while. People who worked in the Bush administration are coming out and saying the agency is not working at its current resource levels. It just can't manage the job," said Caroline Smith DeWaal, director of food safety at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, an advocacy group.
At that rate, why even bother?The United States last year imported about $10 billion more in food, feed and beverages than it exported, according to Census figures. Even as imports grow in volume and diversity, the number of FDA inspections is shrinking: agency inspectors physically examined just 1.3 percent of food imports last year, about three-quarters as much as in 2003.
