Latin America Office
Established in April 2009, FDA’s Latin America Office serves as the lead for FDA’s on-site presence in the 44 countries and territories that span Latin America, Central America, the Caribbean and Mexico. It operates posts in three strategic locations: San Jose, Costa Rica (headquarters), Mexico City, Mexico and Santiago, Chile. The mission of the Latin America Office is to help ensure the safety, quality, and effectiveness of medical products and food produced in the region for export to the United States.
The Latin America Office achieves these objectives by:
- Working both independently and alongside the FDA Centers to assess the capacity of governments to manage, assess, and regulate products within increasingly complex scenarios affecting product safety and efficacy;
- Providing an array of countries with information, tools, training and exchange programs that contribute to building or strengthening their regulatory capacity;
- Sharing resources with regional partners to support science-based regulatory decision-making and pursue the best possible public health solutions, and;
- Monitoring and reporting on regulatory and manufacturing trends, conditions, and emerging public health events that have the potential to impact the safety of FDA-regulated goods produced in the Latin American region that are intended for export to the U.S.
Focus on Latin America
Latin America, led by Mexico, accounts for 40% of all fresh produce consumed in the United States. Additionally, the medical device industry has grown 800% in the Latin American region since 2002, twice the average global growth rate.
- Global CSO Steps Up, Performing Produce Inspections during the Pandemic, Global Update, November 2021
- FDA Places Hand Sanitizers from Mexico on Import Alert, (En Español ), Global Update, February 2021
- Why the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement is Important to FDA ,FDA Voices, November 23, 2020
- FDA and Mexico Sign Statement of Intent Forging Food Safety Partnership | FDA, October 2020
- The FDA and IICA to develop digital platforms to provide training on the FSMA food safety legislation, IICA press release, September 2019
- FDA and IICA train agricultural instructors on the requirements for exporting fresh produce to the United States, IICA press release, July 2019
- IICA and the FDA to train professionals from 13 countries in the hemisphere on the standard for exporting fresh agricultural produce to the United States, IICA press release, September 2018