Should food inspection be privatized?

Let the fox guard the hen house?  What could possibly go wrong?  This time, somebody who's just gone through the revolving door is suggesting we privatize food safety inspections.
   http://www.nytimes.com/... 

WASHINGTON - The Food and Drug Administration proposed sweeping new rules on Friday that would require food importers like Walmart and Cargill to make sure that their foreign growers and processors were following American food safety standards to prevent contamination in an increasingly globalized food supply.
[snip]
The rules, if made final, would shift the responsibility for ensuring that food is safe from the F.D.A. to companies. American companies would have to prove that their foreign suppliers had controls in place through actions like auditing the foreign facilities, testing food, and reviewing records.  American importers would have to keep their own records on foreign suppliers. They would be allowed to hire outside auditors to make on-site inspections. [snip]
"If you look at the cost of doing it all by the feds, what you end up with is inadequate dollars," said Dr. David Acheson, a former F.D.A. official who is currently with Leavitt Partners, a food safety and health care consulting firm in Washington. The current system, he said, "doesn't work anymore. So let's leverage the private sector.

NOTE: These 3 paragraphs came from an online version I saw yesterday, that seems to have been taken down from the Times web site.  The link now leads to a very similar story, probably a later version that has been edited.  I'm confident I didn't hallucinate up those three paragraphs.