WASHINGTON, DC -- In an effort to protect consumers and make it easier to trace contaminations, the U.S. Senate today voted 73-25 to pass the Food Safety Modernization Act, granting the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) stronger oversight of food production and processing standards, and establishing new measures to trace an outbreak back to its source.

U.S. Senator Jack Reed (D-RI), a member of the Senate Health Committee, supported the common-sense legislation to make the food supply safer, hold producers accountable, and protect the livelihoods of Rhode Island family farmers. The bill mandates preventive control systems for food manufacturers to help stop contamination from occurring and uncover problems before the foods get into the chains of distribution.

"Food safety is an important public health and economic issue. This bill will help prevent food that doesn't meet health safety standards from making it onto shelves in the first place. It will grant the FDA new recall authority, so when problems arise the FDA can quickly order tainted food off the market," stated Reed.

The Senate-passed bill included an important provision that exempted small businesses and 98 percent of Rhode Island farms from certain administrative procedures and processes designed to minimize risk for large-scale operations. Senator Reed supported this provision.

"Small farms are the center of the strongest agricultural growth in Rhode Island and we should continue to support sustainable, locally grown foods," said Reed.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, each year there are 76 million cases of food-borne illnesses, 325,000 hospitalizations, and 5,000 deaths.

The FDA Food Safety Modernization Act contains several key provisions to:

Improve inspection: Authorizes additional resources for the FDA to hire new inspectors and requires FDA to inspect food facilities more frequently.

Strengthen preventive controls: Requires facilities that manufacture, process, pack or hold food to have in place risk-based preventive control plans to address identified hazards and prevent adulteration, and gives FDA access to these plans and relevant documentation. These requirements do not apply to restaurants or most farms.

Impose mandatory recall authority: Gives the FDA the authority to order a mandatory recall of a food product if the food will cause serious adverse health consequences or death and a company has failed to voluntarily recall the product upon FDA's request.

Increase Surveillance: Enhances surveillance systems to detect food-borne illnesses.

Establish a new "traceback" system: Requires the FDA to establish a pilot project to test and evaluate new methods for rapidly tracking foods in the event of a food-borne illness outbreak.

The hope is that the U.S. House of Representatives will take up and pass the Senate's bill and send it to the President to be signed into law.