The amount of imported food landing on Canadian dinner plates is growing, but the federal agency responsible for inspecting what Canadians eat relies to a large extent on inspectors in other countries to ensure it is safe.
An internal audit of the way the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) manages the safety of imported food says the agency has failed to develop a strategy to ensure that health hazards are not entering Canada in cans of spices and jars of cooking oil.
While meat, seafood, fish and eggs – foods which are regulated for trade – are subject to a wide range of controls, “imports of other food commodities rely almost exclusively on destination inspections and projects,” the audit says. In other words, the safety of those foods is in the hands of the exporting country.
The problem is largely related to a lack of resources, which has dogged the agency for many years.
Rick Holley, a professor of food safety and food microbiology in the department of food science at the University of Manitoba, says the imported food that is not regulated, and therefore not part of a comprehensive food-safety regime, accounts for about half of what we eat.
And sorting what is regulated from what is not regulated is no easy task for consumers.
“Things like coffee and bananas that we don't produce in Canada are not regulated,” Prof. Holley said. Nor is peanut butter, he said. All of which serves to create a confusing hodgepodge of oversight that leaves Canadians relying, to a large degree, on the skills and diligence of food inspectors abroad.
Without proper inspection, there is no assurance that things such as botulism, salmonella, insect parts and even foreign substances such as metals shards will not find their way into food.
The CFIA audit, which covered the years 2005 to 2008 but was released Thursday, says there is little understanding within the agency about who is accountable for the safety of the imported foods. There is uneven information about how food coming in to this country is to be monitored, it says, and the CFIA management has not taken steps to ensure that previously identified problems have been corrected.
It's a very small percentage of imported food that actually gets looked at — Bob Kingst, national president of the Agriculture Union
The bottom line, wrote Peter Everson, the chief auditor at the food inspection agency, is that CFIA's management of the safety of imported food “has deficiencies that represent multiple areas of risk exposure requiring significant improvements related to the governance, control, and risk management processes.”
A poll conducted in August by Ipsos Reid suggests that 77 per cent of Canadians are concerned about the safety of the food they eat. And 87 of the respondents said they trust food that comes from Canada more than they trust what arrives from abroad.
It's a wariness developed after a series of food scares such as the one in 2006 when the Consumers' Association of Canada warned that malachite green, a cancer-causing fungicide, was turning up in fish imported from China and Vietnam.
But that has not stopped the amount of imported food consumed in this country from growing year after year. The price of food grown and processed abroad makes it enticing to Canadian consumers, and the influx of immigrants from such places as Asia has increased demand for food from more exotic locales
According to the report, the dollar value of the food imported into Canada, when adjusted for inflation, climbed 45 per cent between 1996 and 2006. And the number of countries that ship food to Canada grew from 143 in 1990 to 193 in 2005.
In other words, Canada is importing food from just about every country in the world, from such Western countries as France and the United States as well as from places such as China, India and the Philippines.
“With the growth of the importation of food into Canada over the last 10- to 15-year period, these guys at the CFIA don't have the resources and that is what this report is saying,” Prof. Holley said. “And they don't have the training from one region to another that is heterogeneous.”
Federal Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz, who is responsible for the CFIA, pointed out that a recent report of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development found that Canada has one of the best food inspection regimes in the world.
Since the audit was completed, “CFIA has already taken action to improve enforcement and prosecution of offenders and boost staffing and training of inspectors,” Mr. Ritz said in an e-mail.
The food inspection agency said no one was available to discuss the audit's findings on Thursday. In a statement, the agency said it has taken action to improve the safety of imported food.
But Bob Kingston, the national president of the Agriculture Union, a branch of the Public Service Alliance of Canada, said the CFIA remains an unresourced operation.
“They have to put a lot of faith in foreign certification agencies,” Mr. Kingston said. “It's a very small percentage of imported food that actually gets looked at.”
The fact that so much responsibility for food inspection is left in foreign hands is concerning but not surprising, said Bruce Cran, president of the Consumers' Association of Canada.
