CARTAS AL EDITOR

We welcome your input on new pathways toward minimizing food safety risk. If you wish to have your comments published in producir negocios, feel free to send your thoughts and opinions to editor@producebusiness.com.

Nota del editor: We asked our readers this question — If you could reimagine how the industry prevents foodborne illness outbreaks involving fresh produce, with unlimited resources, technology and government support, what would that look like? Here are some of the responses we received to our online query.

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Can we be honest? By the time infectious diseases figures out where the outbreak came from, it is six weeks after the fact. The product from that particular field has already been consumed and exited out of our systems. We are dealing with perishables that do not have a six-week shelf life.

Tony Aresco, owner, Matarazzo Brothers Co.

Promote consumption of fresh fruits and vegetables that are treated and washed. Educate consumers on safe handling of fresh fruits and vegetables at all levels.

Victor Camacho, sales manager, Antunez & Son Produce

The responsibility starts in the fields with the grower. Fields, packing, transportation, receiving product at the borders, distribution, wholesalers, supermarkets — all of this has to have a strict and reliable certification company that will ensure and check the product at each stage. It is very important that the grower be aware of the problem immediately. Traceability is very important.

Ines Crisantes, vice president of sales, Ultimate Trading Co.

My suggestions would be for more better monitoring of equipment, employees and testing. Also, better and more frequent federal, state and county inspections. Those inspections should be available to the consumer. Overall, I think that the growers and processors should be held more accountable.

James Wolf, manager, Evolve Foods, LLC

We can better educate the public on where the produce comes from. That it is not, in fact, all of the items on the market, which producers are not connected to the recall, alongside who is. We need to better educate the public during these recalls, not just scare them silly.

Erin Wright, director of food sourcing, Ohio Association of Foodbanks

The industry has spent decades strengthening prevention, sanitation, testing and traceability; and those measures remain essential. We believe the next evolution is adding another question: If contamination still occurs, what intervention do we have in place to stop it before that product reaches the consumer?

Jessica Argust, senior marketing specialist, Maglio Companies

If I had unlimited resources, I would redesign produce food safety around prediction rather than reaction. Today, we’re relatively good at investigating what happened after people become sick. The next evolution should be identifying the conditions that make an outbreak more likely before it happens.

I’d build a shared, real-time surveillance system that combines environmental testing with data on irrigation water, weather, flooding, wildlife, nearby livestock operations and pathogen genomics. With enough data and the right technology, we should eventually be able to identify when a particular field, watershed or growing region is experiencing elevated microbial risk and intervene before contaminated product enters the supply chain.

I’d pair that with truly end-to-end digital traceability. When something does go wrong, it shouldn’t take days or weeks to reconstruct the supply chain. We should be able to identify affected product quickly and precisely rather than implicating an entire commodity or growing region.

We’ve made real progress here as an industry, but we can do better. Most importantly, I’d create a system where discovering and reporting a food-safety risk is rewarded, not punished. Technology can give us better sensors and better data, but prevention only works if growers, workers and companies have every incentive to surface problems early.

The goal shouldn’t just be getting better at solving outbreaks or ensuring zero pathogens — that is practically impossible. It should be building a system capable of seeing them coming.

John Paap, manager, Jac Vandenberg, Inc.

It is summertime in the USA. Why are the big grower-shippers in this country sourcing product from Mexico when we are growing more than enough in this country? We need to support the American farmer.

Ira Nathel, president, Nathel & Nathel

FDA Has Failed … USDA Should Step In

What if oversight responsibility for fresh produce had been granted to the USDA, which has that roll for meat, instead of the FDA? I remember the hearings. USDA said they would need resources and staff to do the job. FDA claimed it could be done with existing staff. FDA has never performed even a fraction of the site visits originally envisioned. The produce supply chain is very different than pharmaceuticals or processed products with kill steps and two-year shelf lives. Is it time to reconsider that decision on which agency regulates produce food safety?    

John Pandol, Pandol Bros., Inc.

Rethinking Agricultural Water Safety

Let’s start with the basics. Poop is the origin of many microbial hazards that contribute to the risk of foodborne illness involving fresh produce.

In the case of recent cyclosporiasis out-breaks, it is even more specific: human poop. Today’s produce food safety system remains largely reactive. An outbreak leads to identification of the food vehicle, traceback to the source, sampling for greater clarity, recalls when necessary, and corrective actions intended to reduce future risk. But what if we could prevent contact of fecal contamination with produce before an outbreak occurs?

Prevention efforts have traditionally centered on the growing farm. That makes sense for factors growers can control, including worker hygiene, sanitation, management of waste generated on the farm, and agricultural practices. It is far less effective for agricultural inputs when quality is affected miles upstream, by events outside the grower’s control.

The next major paradigm shift in produce safety should be recognizing that the future unit of prevention is collaborative, across the ecological system. It cannot be limited to the individual farm.

Agricultural water is an ideal case for this shift in thinking, in that water quality management must shift to being done at the level of the water resource that supplies the farm.

A grower cannot prevent contamination that is already present when water reaches the farm. Yet responsibility for under-standing and protecting these systems is fragmented among many organizations that frequently operate independently.

The federal alphabet soup of EPA, FDA, USDA, USGS, and NOAA all generate information relevant to water quality, hydrology, environmental conditions, agriculture or public health. States, water districts, municipalities, wastewater utilities, growers, industry and universities add still more information.

Management of water resources cannot be limited by continuing to operate within independent datasets and institutional silos.

Instead, we envision a National Agricultural Water Protection Network, or NAWPN, in which these participants contribute information to a shared agricultural water intelligence system.

Meteorological forecasting provides a useful precedent. Nobody owns the weather. No single organization produces a weather forecast. Forecasts emerge from integrating observations, models, technol-ogy, and expertise from many independent contributors.

Everyone contributes information, and everyone benefits from better forecasting and better decisions. Agricultural water re-source protection should function in much the same way.

Today, we investigate outbreaks after contamination has occurred. The future should allow us to anticipate contamination, identify the conditions driving that risk, and support preventive or mitigating decisions that prevent contaminated water from ever reaching the crop.

Technology did not allow this vision to be achievable until relatively recently. We lacked both scientific understanding and many of the technologies necessary to build it. Today, we have a much clearer understanding of contamination pathways and of the importance of agricultural water as a pathway for microbial hazards to reach fresh produce.

Every agricultural region could now develop a continuously updated digital representation of its water resources, including basic hydrogeological characteristics, land use, wastewater sources, irrigation infrastructure, and potential contamination pathways.

Dynamic weather, hydrological, environmental, microbial, infrastructure, and observational data could then be layered onto that foundation. The vision is no longer limited primarily by technology. The challenge is whether we are willing and able to integrate information across sectors and translate data into useful decisions.

Implementing NAWPN would require three strategic objectives. First, prevent or reduce contamination entering the water resource through prevention at the source, watershed stewardship, resilient infrastructure, and shared responsibility among those who influence water quality.

Second, understand the system and its contamination pathways through One Health collaboration, the agricultural water assessment process, irrigation system inspections, microbial and environmental surveillance, hydrological information, land-use characterization, and other relevant observations.

Third, transform this information into actionable intelligence through predictive analytics and risk-based decision-making. NAWPN would serve as the integrator and analytical framework connecting these three objectives. Regional water resource information would feed the network; models would evaluate changing conditions and contamination pathways, and the resulting information would be returned to growers as a region-specific Agricultural Water Risk Index, or AWRI.

The AWRI could function much like a weather forecast.

The most difficult question then becomes: What should the grower do with that information? The science is not yet sufficient to prescribe universal action for every AWRI level, commodity, region, or irrigation system.

Over time, research linking specific combinations of water resource conditions, contamination events, agricultural practices, and crop outcomes could allow these general considerations to evolve into validated, region-specific response playbooks.

It remains essential to investigate out-breaks, maintain effective regulatory expectations, and continually improve practices within the grower’s control. NAWPN would not replace those responsibilities. It would make them more realistic by recognizing that growers cannot manage contamination sources that originate far outside their farms without information about the larger system supplying their water.

The future of produce food safety should move from a pathway that is often viewed primarily as field to farm, toward one that recognizes the complete continuum of region, water resource, NAWPN, grower, and field.

The future of produce food safety should not be defined by faster outbreak response. It must be defined by our ability to anticipate, reduce, and prevent outbreaks by stopping contamination before it reaches the field.

Don Stoeckel, Ph.D., professor, Cornell University