Yesterday, I blogged about a bipartisan compromise reached in the Senate on pending food safety legislation. Over at Food Safety News, reporter Helena Botemiller has an overview of what’s in the compromise, which takes the form of a managers’ amendment, as described by Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA).

As expected, the managers’ amendment has many of the same requirements as the original bill, the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act (S. 510), including mandatory recall authority for the FDA and a program to collect fees from food facilities that would fund additional safety inspections.

However, at least one major provision of the bill has been watered down. Based on my reading, under the version approved by Harkin’s committee, FDA would have been required to inspect high-risk food facilities at least once during the first two years following the bill’s passage and at least once per year thereafter. The bill would have required FDA to inspect non-high-risk facilities at least once every four years.

Under the managers’ amendment, FDA would only be required to inspect high-risk facilities at least once during the first five years and at least once every three years thereafter. FDA would have to inspect non-high-risk facilities at least once during the first seven years and at least once every five years thereafter.

The change to the requirements for high-risk facilities is significant: Over a 50-year span, a high-risk facility would be inspected 33 fewer times under the managers’ amendment than under the committee bill.

The change was apparently made in response to objections over the bill’s costs to government. The Consumer Federation of America (CFA), which continues to champion the bill, is unhappy with the change:

We are extremely disappointed that the Senate, in order to reduce the estimated cost of the legislation, reduced the frequency of FDA inspections of food processing facilities. Regular and frequent inspection is a basic part of prevention.

Inspectors are cops on the beat—checking to be sure that corporate process controls are operating as intended. 

It should also be noted that, contrary to the pessimism I expressed in yesterday’s post, many are still hopeful that the Senate can pass the bill when it returns from recess in September. "I still think the chances are very good," Carol Tucker-Foreman of CFA told Food Safety News, “noting that industry and consumer groups remain highly engaged.”

Stay tuned.