The American Feed Industry Association (AFIA) is calling upon the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to consider reducing the regulatory burden for feed manufactures.
AFIA wants FDA to consider streamlining or removing several federal regulations and record-keeping requirements that are unclear, duplicative, antiquated or do nothing to enhance the safety of America’s animal food supply at the great expense of small and large animal food manufacturers.
AFIA submitted formal comments to the agency in response to its federal docket (FDA-2017-N-5104) requesting input from industry and other stakeholders on current human and animal food safety regulations and information collection requirements that could be improved upon or reduced. Upon submitting the letter to the FDA, Richard Sellers, AFIA’s senior vice president of public policy and education, said: “The American Feed Industry Association appreciates the opportunity to provide feedback to the Food and Drug Administration on several regulations impacting the animal food manufacturing industry and hopes the agency will review our comments in the spirit they are offered, mainly, as an effort to reduce the regulatory burden, both on the Center for Veterinary Medicine and regulated industry, while not compromising animal food safety.
AFIA hired several new staff during the last presidential administration just to keep up with the breadth and depth of new regulations impacting our industry and appreciates the current administration’s goal of rolling back unnecessary and burdensome regulations facing American manufacturers. As such, we hope our comments, and those of many others, are not stored somewhere and never reviewed. We believe the development of meaningful regulatory reform ideals would provide tremendous benefit in time and resources not just to the regulated industry, but also to the FDA, and urge the agency to seriously and swiftly review these comments and move toward a concerted effort to make positive changes in regulations.”
AFIA’s letter outlines several requests for the FDA to consider in its effort to make its regulations more impactful, including:
Reducing the need for FDA inspectors to learn, and large feed mills to comply with, 2 sets of current good manufacturing practices (CGMPs), by aligning the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) CGMPs with those of the medicated feed CGMPs, which have been in place for 40 years.