August 1, 2007

US House Ag bill seeks to stop meat inspection plan

The US House version of the fiscal 2008 agricultural spending bill, which is expected to be voted this week, seeks to stop the US Department of Agriculture's plan to shift the focus of federal meat inspection to processing plants it believes present a higher risk for health problems.

So far, the USDA plan is still in the early stages of a pilot program, but the House bill forbids any government funds from being used to further it until more research is done.

The intent behind the USDA's "risk-based inspection" system is to allow federal inspectors to "spend more time at the plants that need attention," a government official said. "Inspectors would still visit every plant at least once daily, but would spend more time at some plants than others."

Richard Raymond, administrator of USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service or FSIS, told reporters earlier this year that the plan wasn't designed to cut government spending on food safety. Some meat-processing plants would receive "less intense" scrutiny from federal inspectors, but others would get "more intense" scrutiny.

But the chairwoman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Agriculture, Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., has often accused the USDA of not knowing enough about the meat-processing plants that are inspected. The USDA plan, she said earlier this year, "is only as good as the data it is predicated on."

The legislation forbidding funding for risk-based inspection mandates the USDA Office of Inspector General investigate whether or not USDA's FSIS has enough data to support "the development and design of the risk-based inspection program and FSIS has addressed and resolved issues identified by OIG."

Another controversial provision in the US$91.5 billion agriculture spending bill would scuttle the Bush administration's attempt to allow for the imports of processed poultry from China.

China is already allowed to ship processed chicken to the US, but only if the raw chicken is of US origin and is cooked during the processing. The new rule the USDA is working on goes further by seeking to allow China to export its own domestically grown chicken after cooking.