WASHINGTON - February 22 - The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced changes today to the nation's meat inspection program that would result in less inspection and more risk of food borne illnesses for Americans, charged consumer advocacy group Food & Water Watch.

"Far from being a sound use of science or an efficient use of limited resources, risk based inspection means one thing for consumers – more risk and less protection," said Food & Water Watch Executive Director Wenonah Hauter.

Of the 291 plants in the new program, 46 percent produce ground beef or ready-to-eat meats, products considered high risk for contamination and commonly fed to children.  The plan assigns teams of inspectors to groups of plants, 11 to 89 percent of which produce the kind high-risk product that have been subjected to recent recalls for under processing and Salmonella contamination.

"The data that USDA would use to calculate the risk posed by each plant, which determines the amount of government inspection that plants will receive, is nowhere near complete enough or accurate enough to give a realistic picture of how plants are performing," continued Hauter.

USDA’s own inspector general has criticized the department’s food safety data collection system on more than one occasion, the group explained. A September 2006 USDA Inspector General report identified as many as 865 establishments nationwide that have no testing data for Salmonella, a possible under sampling rate of 58 percent. The agency has recently increased its E. coli O157:H7 testing at ground beef plants, but still does not average one test a month.

The data USDA collects from slaughterhouses and processing plants has been compromised by years of staff shortages and faulty management, charged Food & Water Watch. USDA has suffered from chronic inspector shortages in some of the same parts of the country targeted for this experimental inspection program. In June of 2006, UDSA threatened to layoff inspectors because of budget shortfalls. Although USDA never carried out layoffs, staffing was so short that some inspectors had as many as 26 plants to cover per day.

Meat inspectors have complained that they are encouraged by supervisors to issue verbal warnings to companies instead of filing reports on violations, leaving no data trail.

"Inspectors cannot collect data on plants they do not visit because of staff shortages or violations they do not record because of questionable directives from management," explained Hauter. "A data driven system based on faulty data will put American consumers at a greater risk of contracting food borne illnesses."

Food & Water Watch also raised concerns about how the new system could affect the quality of meat.  USDA considers wholesomeness defects like tumors, vomit, feathers, bruises, cuts, and other damage as a separate category from bacterial contamination problems that it classifies as food safety issues. The new proposal will minimize the attention paid to these wholesomeness concerns by inspectors, leaving consumers unprotected.

The group also drew attention to flaws in the USDA process for developing the experimental program.  The agency’s plan to shift to a risk-based inspection system is being done without the involvement of Congress.  This is a critical problem, since a change to risk-based inspection may not meet the standard of “continuous” government inspection set by the Federal Meat Inspection Act and the Poultry Products Inspection Act, the federal laws that established the meat inspection system.

Food & Water Watch’s background memo on USDA’s risk based inspection proposal can be found at: http://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/food/foodsafety/meat-inspection-1/rbi_background

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