The recall earlier this month of 143 million tons of ground beef because of downer cattle in the food supply was the largest recall of ground beef in this nation’s history.

Fortunately, it appears that the damage from this latest food-safety scare was limited to producers’ profits and Americans’ already shaky sense of confidence in our nation’s food safety system.

It could have been worse. The company that sold the suspect meat was one of the largest suppliers for the federal school lunch program. By the time the recall was ordered, American schoolkids had already eaten nearly 50 tons of the potentially contaminated ground beef. It’s unknown how many tons had been purchased by American families.

Fortunately, no serious illnesses or deaths have been linked to this latest beef recall.  We may not be as lucky the next time.

During the last year, we’ve seen major recalls of peanut butter spiked with salmonella, spinach laced with E. coli and chili laced with a botulism chaser. We’ve seen contaminated seafood and poisoned pet food.

These are not isolated incidents. They are the results of a food safety system that is outdated, underfunded and overwhelmed.

Responsibility for food labeling and food safety is spread out over 12 different federal agencies using 35 different rulebooks, and all answering to different committees in Congress.

It is a system full of both wasteful overlap and dangerous gaps in oversight, and it is in desperate need of restructuring, additional resources and updated authority.

I’ve been working for more than a decade on ways to strengthen the way the United States protects our food supply.

Instead of continuing to react to food scares with piecemeal changes, we need a complete re-thinking and reorganization of America’s food safety system.

Ultimately, I believe that we need to consolidate all federal food safety functions under a single agency. It would save lives.  It would likely also save taxpayer dollars.  That has been the experience in Canada and other nations that have already moved to the single agency model for food safety.

The change doesn’t have to happen all at once. It can be done in stages. But it has to start now.

The first step must be to adequately fund the agencies responsible for food safety and inspections.

Think about this: The USDA is responsible for inspecting and regulating 80 percent of America’s food supply, yet it receives less than half of the money allocated for food safety inspections.

The FDA, which regulates the other 20 percent of the food supply, receives more — but still not enough to do its job.

In a recent study, the agency’s own Science Board warned, “FDA’s ability to provide its basic food system inspection, enforcement and rulemaking functions is severely eroded.”  And FDA Commissioner Andrew von Eshenbach said recently, “I think to do what we need to do requires substantially more dollars than what has been invested in the FDA thus far.”

Between 1986 and 2006, funding for the National Institutes of Health increased five-fold and funding for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention grew by a factor of 12, but the FDA received only a threefold funding increase.

We now import almost $65 billion of food from overseas — almost $2 billion of that total comes from China. Food imports in America boomed from 2004 to 2007. Yet, during that same time period, the number of fulltime FDA food inspectors dropped from 3,028 to just over 2,600.

Bottom line: At the same time food imports are increasing, funding for food safety inspections is decreasing — leaving Americans at a growing risk of food-borne illnesses.

Consumer groups and members of Congress have urged the administration to increase funding for the FDA. I will continue this push during this year’s appropriations process.

But taxpayer dollars aren’t the only option for boosting food-safety funding.

More than 15 years ago, the FDA began charging the makers of medical devices and prescription drugs a small user fee for inspections. The fees enabled the agency to hire more staff and significantly reduce the time required for reviews.

The fees are based on a simple principle:  Companies that benefit from FDA approval should pay a small amount toward the agency’s operation.

I believe we should extend that same principle to food safety.

I’ve proposed a user fee for FDA functions that provide benefits to industry. The fees would enable FDA to hire more inspectors and modernize its technology, which would greatly improve inspection rates.

With foreign imports only increasing, FDA also needs to work with foreign governments to establish universal standards for quality control, safety and inspections. Recent agreements with China are promising, but we need to go further. The FDA must be able to send inspectors to foreign plants, and to detain and hold suspect food shipments.

We got lucky when the largest beef recall in U.S. history didn’t sicken or kill any schoolkids or other Americans. But we can’t count on luck to protect our food supplies.

And we can’t continue with piecemeal, reactive fixes only.

America needs a uniform, modern set of food safety standards and a single, top-notch federal agency to enforce those standards.

Durbin is a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee.