§1401 Pesticide Monitoring and Enforcement Information

Summary

The Secretary of Health and Human Services must set up computerized data systems for the Food and Drug Administration within 480 days after August 23, 1988. Those systems must record, summarize, and evaluate FDA testing for pesticide residues in food. They must find gaps in monitoring (in pesticides, food types, and country or domestic sources), spot trends and health concerns, help target testing to residues that matter for public health, produce the summaries described below, and give information to help the Environmental Protection Agency with its pesticide and food safety work. The Secretary must also, as soon as possible, make the systems able to produce a separate summary of import volumes. The FDA may use these systems or create more, and the systems must follow rules for computer design and buying. The systems must produce yearly summaries about: what imported and U.S. foods were tested, how many samples by country, which residues tests can detect, which residues and at what levels were found, whether samples met the law and violation rates by country-product, and what was done with violative samples and where they ended up; also the country of origin and the U.S. district where each import entered. The FDA must also summarize import volumes for food types whose entry value is above an amount set by the Secretary, by country and district, using other federal data when possible. Not later than 90 days after the end of the first year the systems work, and every year after that, the Secretary must compile the prior year’s summaries and make them available to federal and state agencies and other interested people.