Los Angeles Times: Pork industry to gain power over inspections
by Kimberly Kindy | Washington Post | Apr 03, 2019
The Trump administration plans to shift much of the power and responsibility for food safety inspections in hog plants to the pork industry as early as May, cutting the number of federal inspectors by about 40% and replacing them with plant employees.
Under the proposed new inspection system, the responsibility for identifying diseased and contaminated pork would be shared with plant employees, whose training would be at the discretion of plant owners. There would be no limits on slaughter-line speeds.
The new pork inspection system would accelerate the federal government’s move toward delegating inspections to the livestock industry. During the Obama administration, poultry plant owners were given more power over safety inspections, although that administration canceled plans to increase line speeds. The Trump administration in September allowed some poultry plants to increase line speeds.
The Trump administration also is working to shift inspection of beef to plant owners. U.S. Department of Agriculture officials are scheduled next month to discuss the proposed changes with the meat industry.
These proposals, part of the Trump administration’s broader effort to reduce regulations, come as the federal government is under fire for delegating some of its aircraft safety oversight responsibilities to Boeing, which developed the 737 Max jets involved in two fatal crashes over the last six months. Federal Aviation Administration certification of the two aircraft involved in the crashes took place under the Trump administration, but the major shift toward delegating key aspects of aviation oversight began during the George W. Bush administration.
Pat Basu, the chief veterinarian with the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service from 2016 to 2018, refused to sign off on the new pork system because of concerns about safety for both consumers and livestock. The USDA sent the proposed regulations to the Federal Register about a week after Basu left, and they were published less than a month later, according to records and interviews.
“Look at the FAA. It took a year or so before the crashes happened,” Basu said. “This could pass and everything could be OK for a while, until some disease is missed and we have an outbreak all over the country. It would be an economic disaster that would be very hard to recover from.”
Basu’s top concern is with giving plant workers the responsibility to identify and remove live diseased hogs when the hogs arrive at the plants. He said that job should remain with trained USDA veterinarians so they can identify contagious diseases like foot and mouth, which can maim and destroy livestock, profoundly affecting the economy. One analysis by Kansas State University researchers determined such an outbreak could cost producers and the public $188 billion and state and federal governments $11 billion.
The National Pork Producers Council, the association for the $20-billion pork industry, said the new system will create a more symbiotic relationship with USDA workers who will “partner with the pork industry to better ensure safe products are entering the marketplace,” according to an issues paper the trade group distributed on Capitol Hill.
USDA officials declined interview requests, saying they would not speak publicly about the new regulations until they are final. The proposed regulations have been published in the Federal Register.
In the past, officials in the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service have defended their efforts to transfer more of its oversight control to the pork industry. They said federal inspectors will spend less time assessing the quality of the pork, which will give them more time to look for disease and contamination.
Food-borne illnesses, they said, typically come from microscopic pathogens that are best detected through testing.
“More emphasis will be placed on preventing contamination rather than reacting to it afterwards,” said William James, the head veterinarian in the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service from 2008 to 2011, who helped develop the regulations.
“These [inspection] systems have evolved since the ’80s, and they will continue to do so,” he said. “We cannot do things the same ways we’ve always done them.”
However, USDA officials confirmed they have no plans under the new system to test for salmonella — for which USDA once tested. The agency will rely heavily on pathogen testing by plant owners, but those results will not have to be publicly disclosed. The hog plants also will no longer be required to test for E. coli, records show.
Joseph Ferguson is a former USDA hog inspector who retired in 2015 after working 23 years under the traditional inspection system as well as with a trial program that created the new proposed system. He said federal regulators lost control when plant workers supplanted them. Hog carcasses whizzed by him and the plant-paid inspectors at speeds so fast that fecal contamination — an important indicator for E. coli and salmonella — could not be detected.
“All the power gets handed over to the plant,” Ferguson said. “I saw the alleged inspections that were performed by plant workers; they weren’t inspections. They were supposed to meet or exceed USDA standards — I never saw that happen.”
The proposed hog slaughter rule is based on a study that began 20 years ago, ultimately including five large plants. Efforts to expand the program have sputtered under past administrations, but Trump administration officials have told industry trade groups that they expect the proposed regulations to soon become final. They say 40 of the 612 hog plants not already using the new system will begin using the program. Collectively, agriculture officials say, these plants will produce 90% of the pork produced in the United States.
An analysis by the USDA of 35 of the 40 plants estimated that the number of federal inspectors would shrink from 365 to 218. That same analysis estimated that the new system will save $6 million annually and that large plants — by increasing their line speeds by more than 12% — will increase their profits annually by more than $2 million. The current cap on line speed is 1,106 hogs per hour, or 18 hogs per minute.
Food safety advocates say giving more control to plant owners is a step away from the overhauls that gave federal inspectors authority over food safety in slaughterhouses in the first place. In 1906, Upton Sinclair’s novel “The Jungle” was published, describing the high rate of rotten and contaminated meat being processed in a Chicago meatpacking plant. Public outrage fueled the passage of a federal law that year requiring meat to be slaughtered under sanitary conditions and under the supervision of federal inspectors.
Although there have been huge advances in food safety in meatpacking plants, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that about 500,000 people become ill and 82 die each year from consuming pathogen-laced pork products. Hog plants produce about 11 million tons of pork products annually, with 75% eaten in the United States, according to industry statistics.
The proposed inspection program has faced harsh criticism by government auditors and investigators.
In May 2013, the USDA’s inspector general issued a report that found three of the five plants in the trial program had numerous health and safety violations. Safety records at those three plants were worse than those at hundreds of other U.S. hog plants that continued to operate under the traditional system, auditors found.
A separate September 2013 Government Accountability Office report determined that the five-plant trial program was too small to “provide reasonable assurance that any conclusions can apply more broadly to the universe of 608 hog plants in the United States.”
No independent government assessments of the program have been done since the 2013 reports.
When it comes to worker safety, USDA said in its proposed regulations that the plants in the trial program — which use the faster line speeds — experienced a drop in worker injuries.
The National Employment Law Project, a nonprofit that advocates for worker safety, questioned those findings. Meat slaughter and meat-processing jobs have high injury rates that occupational experts attribute to the fast, repetitive motions workers perform throughout an eight- to 10-hour shift.
Illness rates for people who work in the meatpacking business — including carpal tunnel syndrome and tendinitis — are 16 times higher than for workers in other industries, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The USDA did not make its analysis or data public. The National Employment Law Project obtained it through a public information request. Two Texas State University researchers who specialize in quantitative methods and statistics analyzed the data and concluded that “it is impossible for [the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service] to draw any statistically valid conclusion about worker injury rate differences.”
The analysis by Texas researchers got the attention of Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), the second-ranking Senate Democrat. Durbin recently sent a letter signed by 16 other Democrats to the USDA inspector general’s office, asking for an investigation. Especially egregious, Durbin said, is that it appears that the USDA intentionally kept the analysis out of public view until it was forced to disclose it, and only after the public comment period had passed for the proposed inspection system.
“Using flawed data, the USDA is rushing to approve a rule concerning slaughter rates on hog farms, and it could jeopardize worker safety for a job that already comes with considerable risks and dangers,” Durbin said in a statement to the Washington Post. “The safety of tens of thousands of workers in pork processing plants should be USDA’s priority, and right now it clearly isn’t.”
The Food Safety and Inspection Service responded that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, not the inspection service, has the “statutory and regulatory authority to promote workplace safety and health.”
Kimberly Kindy is a reporter for the Washington Post.
Boeing planes seem to have proven faulty and caused many deaths, partially due to “self certification”. Is that where pork is headed? Meat inspection integrity has been more used as a economic tool in recent years rather than an independent inspection for food safety integrity. This is due to money and power in politics. It seems that is where we are headed to with pork meat inspection. That would work if we had a working judicial system where those harmed by poor meat practices that lead to sickness or death were properly and efficiently compensated. The problem is that we can not count on a judiciary doing their job anymore. Their essential part in “free market economics” has also been neutered by money and power. Court case results are not based on law anymore, it seems, but on the judiciary playing favorites with their colleagues in the money and power club.
Every day I feel a little older. I wonder what kind of system we are bequeathing to our heirs. I know one thing for sure. It is seriously degrading. I am sure my wife’s students in high school would like to give themselves their own grade instead of having a teacher do it. Our founding fathers knew these basic truths about humans and gave us a great government to counteract those weaknesses. Too bad we are ignoring their wisdom.