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Safety at the Speed of Life- Blog 4  (no comments)

Posted by: Michael Leavitt
Thursday, July 24th, 2008

As a continuation of my blog series on the safety of our product imports, I want to illustrate the change in our basic strategy by talking about the shrimp business. I was in Vietnam and Central America recently– both are big producers and exporters of shrimp. I met with representatives of the shrimp industry in both places.

We talked about the impact on their product when a shipment gets detained at our border. Delays create huge costs and often disrupt or even close affected businesses.

Members of the shrimp industry independently decided that they needed to develop a set of quality and safety standards, and a way to verify compliance with those standards. They did this because their consumers needed to know that their products were safe and of high quality. They developed a formal, voluntary collaboration that produced a set of industry standards and certification process.

A centerpiece of our new strategy is to encourage, leverage, and build upon such voluntary third-party efforts. We are not inventing a new concept. It already exists. And it works.

We observed independent certification being used in many sectors of the import world. Until now, we have not integrated this capacity for improvement into our regulatory responsibility. This needs to be a government-wide strategy; ultimately, it should apply to all product lines.

Since FDA has responsibility for the safety of a significant share of our imports, I would like to outline the way we are transforming the Food and Drug Administration to harness the power of this new vision.

In the future, products from those firms that have standards and certification processes that we trust will be given expedited entry and access to U.S. consumers. The FDA will be freed to focus its enforcement resources on those suppliers that don’t have certified products. FDA is establishing a pilot with the shrimp industry to help learn how to evaluate third-party certification programs, and implement them in the field.

So we are saying clearly: “We want you to have access to American consumer markets — we want to have access to yours. To do so, you need to meet American standards of quality and safety. If you can demonstrate through a process we trust, that your products meet the safety standards that we have mutually agreed upon, we’ll be your partners in speed.”

Can you see the linkage that connects speed and safety?

Speed is accomplished when trust has been established. Trust happens only with complete transparency. Transparency requires standards, and standards require collaboration.

This is a key point — a change born of the global market — collaboration is the new frontier of human productivity. I believe learning better collaborative skills is a requirement for success in this century. It is a proven method of solving complex problems, and it’s hard work. I want to write more about the importance of collaboration with other governments around safety in a global market, and I will pick up here in my next entry.