The new system, which was adopted last year, shifts many food safety tasks from federal inspectors to pork industry employees and reduces the number of Agriculture Department inspectors on slaughter lines in some plants by 40 percent, records show. Pork plant owners are also allowed to accelerate slaughter-line speeds faster than in conventional plants, which critics say lessens the opportunity to find contamination.
The data shows that the five plants used in the test program were cited by USDA inspectors nearly twice as often for having fecal and digestive matter on the hog carcasses when they reached the end of the slaughter line. The USDA has a zero-tolerance policy for this type of contamination, which contains high levels of deadly human pathogens such as E. coli and salmonella.
The records, obtained by the nonprofit consumer group Food and Water Watch through a Freedom of Information Act request, compared the test plants with 21 traditional plants of comparable size from 2014 to 2017, the years immediately preceding the push to expand the program.
Testing for the new rules went on for more than 20 years before the Trump administration turned it into a full-fledged program.
“This data shows that when swine slaughter plants are left to police themselves, as they are under the Trump administration’s new inspection rules, there is more fecal matter and digestive contents that ends up on the food we eat,” said Zach Corrigan, senior attorney for the organization.
The Trump-era system remains in effect under President Biden. To reverse or alter it, the new administration would probably have to propose and successfully finalize a new regulation, a process that can take years.
Biden has not taken a public position on the inspection system. However, in a town hall last year, he said he opposed USDA regulations that have allowed the meat industry to increase slaughter line speeds, citing worker safety concerns.
“Whether it’s cattle, whether it’s beef, whether it’s pigs, whether it’s chicken, they’re moving down that line faster and faster and faster to increase the profit rate,” Biden said. “People are getting sicker. People are getting hurt.”
The USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service declined to comment for this article, citing pending litigation over the new inspection system. Three separate lawsuits are seeking to halt use of the new system, citing food safety, worker safety and animal welfare concerns.
Food and Water Watch filed one of the lawsuits last year with two other nonprofits, Center for Food Safety and Humane Farming Association. The lawsuit was amended Thursday to include the new data.
Under Trump, the USDA defended its efforts to transfer more control of food safety oversight to the pork industry. Officials there said federal inspectors spend less time assessing the quality of the pork with the new system, which gives them more time to look for disease and contamination. Foodborne illnesses, they said, typically come from microscopic pathogens that are best detected through testing.
The North American Meat Institute, a trade group for the industry, said in a statement that the higher citation rates in the test plants does not necessarily mean more pork is being contaminated. The new system requires that USDA inspectors perform at least twice as many inspection tasks off the slaughter line — sometimes referred to as spot checks — as they do in traditional plants. This is probably the cause for the higher rate of citations, said spokeswoman Sarah Little.
However, Corrigan said the rates account for this, because they were calculated by looking at the number of violations per spot check. “The rate per spot check nearly doubled,” he said. Corrigan said that means that plant employees on the slaughter line — where USDA inspectors once worked — are failing to remove the contamination before it reaches the end of the slaughter line.
Little countered by saying the offline inspections can often include the evaluation of more hog carcasses than the traditional plants do.
The lawsuit in which Food and Water Watch is a plaintiff seeks to stop the new inspection system, claiming it will harm consumers by eliminating statutory requirements that federal government inspectors perform critical inspection responsibilities. It also says that the new system conflicts with requirements of the 1906 Federal Meat Inspection Act, which requires that meat and meat products are slaughtered and processed under strictly regulated sanitary conditions.
Earlier this month, a federal judge denied the USDA’s motion to dismiss the case, saying the groups had legal standing to pursue their claims.
In his ruling, Judge Jeffrey S. White said that he concluded “there is a credible threat that [their] members face an increased risk of illness from consuming adulterated pork products because of the [new rules], sufficiently establishing standing based on potential future harm.”
For more than a decade, USDA inspectors at the test plants said that under the program, hogs fly by them so quickly — as many six per minute — that they cannot spot fecal matter that contains deadly pathogens. They also say plant employees who have replaced them are less likely to stop the slaughter line to remove the contamination or to throw out the carcass because such actions can cut into profits.
Beyond the five plants in the test program, the USDA estimates that 35 additional pork plants are expected to use the new system. They would collectively produce 90 percent of pork consumed in the United States, USDA records show.
Although there have been huge advances in food safety in meatpacking plants, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that about a half-million 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, and 75 percent of it is sold in the United States, according to industry statistics.
The 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.
Last year, the USDA Inspector General issued a report that said the department did not evaluate the accuracy of worker safety data it cited when the proposed regulation was posted in the Federal Register. The report also found that USDA was not transparent about the raw data it used in its worker safety analysis, making it impossible for outside experts to evaluate the agency’s conclusions.
February 19, 2021 at 07:36AM
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Pork plants in a USDA test program had higher contamination rates than traditional plants - The Washington Post
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