Food safetyUSDA plans to expand private meat inspection scheme despite criticism
The USDA’s plan to expand a pilot program which shifts responsibility from government inspectors at meat processing plants to private or company-employed inspectors has faced skepticism and criticism. The pilot plan was supposed to be evaluated, but the USDA Inspector General reported that the department has yet to study the effectiveness of the plan in improving food safety and efficiency in the plants. Critics say the replacement of government inspectors has led to an increase in the number of instances of contaminated meat in the U.S. plants which have adopted the plan – and also in the Canadian and Australian meat plant where the scheme has been implemented.
The USDA’s plan to expand a pilot program which shifts responsibility from government inspectors at meat processing plants to private or company-employed inspectors has faced skepticism and criticism.
The Washington Post reports that the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point-based Inspection Models Project (HIMP) dates back to 1997, when USDA announced it would allow five large hog plants to enroll in the project. The project was to reduce the use of USDA inspectors and accelerate processing lines, resulting in lower cost of operations for both the meat companies and the USDA. The USDA agreed to review the performance of the new procedure adopted by the five hog plants, but there were no reviews or inspections of the procedures. The USDA Inspector General reported that the department has yet to study the effectiveness of the plan in improving food safety and efficiency in the plants.
Three of the plants enrolled in HIMP were among the ten worst offenders in the country for health and safety violations, based on a report by the USDA IG. The offenses include failure to remove fecal matter from meat. In these three cases, the contaminated meat was not processed for sale because it was caught by government inspectors once it reached the end of the processing line. Inspectors consider the timing of discovery to be too late in the process.
The USDA has allowed other countries to use a process similar to HIMP in the production of red meat for export to the United States. The Canadian and Australian plants enrolled in the program have experienced problems and inspection failures. Last year, a Canadian beef-processing plant enrolled in the program had to recall 8.8 million pounds of beef and beef products tainted with E.coli; 2.5 million pounds of the tainted beef was exported to the United States. Canadian safety inspectors fault the faster production line for the contamination.
Eleven shipments of beef, mutton, and goat meat from four Australian plants enrolled in procedures similar to HIMP have been stopped at U.S. ports due to contamination which included fecal matter and partly digested food, both of which may contain strains of E. coli and listeria.
Patricia Buck, a member of the USDA’s National Advisory Committee on Meat and Poultry Inspection and co-founder of the Center for Foodborne Illness Research and Prevention, said, “There is a lot of controversy surrounding this program. We should not be putting it out there, saying it is okay for other countries to use, when it has so many flaws and when contaminated meat is coming in.”
Dozens of poultry plants have been enrolled in a similar pilot program and the USDA plans to expand the procedures to be used in all chicken and turkey plants upon finalizing regulations this year.
