21 U.S.C. § 18 — Suspension of importation of adulterated articles

This section lets the President block imports of unsafe food or drink from a specific foreign country. The President must first be satisfied there is good reason to believe an import is happening, or about to happen. That import must involve an article used for human food or drink. The article must be "adulterated to an extent dangerous to the health or welfare" of people in the United States. That phrase means the food is contaminated or altered in a way that threatens public health. If those conditions are met, the President may proclaim a suspension of importing such articles from that country. The President decides how long the suspension lasts, based on how much time he thinks is necessary to prevent the dangerous imports. Once the proclamation issues, the law changes the legal status of those goods. During the suspension, it becomes unlawful to import the named articles into the United States from any country the proclamation names. This restriction applies only to the specific articles the President identified as dangerous, and only for the period the proclamation states.

The record indicates that this section derives from an Act of Congress dated August 30, 1890, chapter 839, section 4, published at 26 Stat. 415. The source credit lists no subsequent amendments, indicating that the text has remained unchanged since its original enactment. Historical context: The 1890 Act is generally understood as part of a broader federal effort in the late nineteenth century to regulate the safety of food products entering interstate and international commerce, at a time when concerns about adulterated meat, dairy, and other foodstuffs—both domestic and imported—were prominent in American public life. This period saw growing public and governmental attention to food purity, spurred in part by trade disputes with European nations over American meat exports and by domestic anxieties about contamination and fraud in the food supply. The commonly cited purpose of provisions like this one was to grant the President authority to act swiftly against imported food products believed to pose a danger to public health, without requiring case-by-case congressional action. Beyond this general understanding of the era's public-health and trade concerns, the record does not establish the specific legislative motivation, debates, or particular incidents that led Congress to include this precise provision in the 1890 Act. Any more detailed account of the section's origin would exceed what the available record supports.