By Missy Ryan

WASHINGTON, Aug 8 (Reuters) - U.S. safety standards for imported food and other goods are not up for debate with trading partners, a senior American official said on Wednesday as the Bush administration charts a course for staving off more dangerous imports.

"It's the American standard that American consumers are relying on," said Health & Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt, whom President George W. Bush tapped last month to lead a senior-level panel drafting suggestions on import safety.

"If you're going to import into our country, you need to understand what our standards ... are, and we'll help you and give you assistance in order to meet them," Leavitt said in an interview during a tour of U.S. import and food facilities.

Leavitt has visited a seafood plant in Maryland, inspected a supermarket in Ohio and stopped off at a busy border crossing with Canada in recent days as he examines how the government and companies are handling a growing tide of imports making their way across U.S. borders.

While it is unclear how the visits will inform suggestions due next month from the panel, which also includes the State Department and other agencies, the sites Leavitt has chosen evoke the rash of recent import scares that have unsettled Americans.

The list of contaminated goods is growing: toothpaste tainted with antifreeze, fresh ginger laced with pesticide, catfish showing residue of antibacterial and fungal agents, Sesame Street toys at risk for toxic paint.

One thing made clear by the visits so far, Leavitt said, is the sheer enormity of the task.

The Food and Drug Administration, which oversees about 80 percent of U.S. food imports, inspected just 1.3 percent of the foreign food import lines in its purview in fiscal 2006.

And, with U.S. reliance on exports growing, the problem could become even bigger. The volume of cargo processed at U.S. ports could triple by 2015, Leavitt said.

ROLLING BORDERS BACK

"That in and of itself eliminates the option of physical inspection everywhere, so we have to build a system where the quality and safety is part of the process," he said.

That entails "rolling our borders back," as Leavitt put it, by pressing other nations to enact tighter quality controls before goods leave their country of origin.

Much of the recent debate has centered around goods from China, the United States' third-largest trading partner. China is the source of 90 percent of U.S. shrimp, for example.

U.S. officials recently returned from a mission to China, where they established a framework for stiffer oversight by Beijing. But China's government has bristled, too, at the increased scrutiny, accusing critics of distorting the issue.

The Bush administration -- which sees a problem much larger than China -- has taken other steps, like appointing a new food protection czar in the Food and Drug Administration.

A growing number of lawmakers, though, want to see greater strides, and some have put forward their own plans for combating the problem. Democratic Sen. Richard Durbin of Illinois, for example, wants to impose a new fee on food imports to help pay for wider inspections.

Leavitt said the panel's report, due on Bush's desk on Sept. 17, will be far from the last word on this issue.

"We're not creating a checklist that can be completed and then our task will have achieved perfection. What we're developing is a strategy for continuous improvement," he said.

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