Message from the Director September 2011
As we all know, last week was the 10th anniversary of the tragedies of 9/11, and in reflecting on the food and agriculture system, a great deal has changed in that 10 years. FDA and USDA now have groups focused specifically on food defense. We have a Department of Homeland Security that has several offices with food defense responsibilities. In USDA-regulated facilities, the majority of food plants have food defense plans, and based upon the full implementation of the Food Safety and Modernization Act, all FDA plants will have food defense plans. In many companies there are people who have added food defense to their existing responsibilities or new food defense staff have been added. We have great strides made by FDA, USDA and DHS in providing assistance and guidance to help food firms understand potential risks. And states are finally able to identify which infrastructures within their states are most critical in order to prioritize their ability to protect them. This is by using FASCAT, the Food and Agriculture and Sector Criticality Assessment Tool, one of the Center’s research projects. All of these advances mean that our food system is certainly both safer from an unintentional contamination viewpoint and better protected from an intentional contamination viewpoint than it was on 9/11. But it is over a hundred years since the founding of USDA and FDA and we still have natural foodborne illness events. In food defense, we still have significant work to do to close the remaining vulnerabilities in order to make our food system safer and more protected against intentional contamination. It is important to recognize that we can't prevent everything, going for zero risk is not an option. That’s why we have to prioritize our efforts so that we make sure that the worst things that could happen, don’t happen, and that we can deal with the things that do happen. As we look forward to the next 10 years, I’m sure that we will be able report that again, there will have been significant advances in food defense. And in 10 years we will be able to report again that there are still additional challenges that need to be met in order to continue to protect the public and our food infrastructure.