USDA: New Bosses, Same Old Problems?

Best known for its extensive meat-grading system, the U.S. Department of Agriculture got a few unsolicited grades of its own recently from a coalition of consumer and labor groups: Straight Fs, as in flunked out.

In Congressional testimony, the Safe Food Coalition claims that the USDA, even under the Clinton administration, has failed on four important fronts to improve the safety of the nation’s meat and poultry supply, and that the department’s operations remain essentially unchanged despite continuing problems with serious contaminants such as E. coli 0157:H7.

The coalition--which includes Consumers Union, Public Voice for Food and Health Policy and the Center for Science in the Public Interest--placed blame on both current and former USDA officials.

The criticism concludes that “the combined effects of inertia, ineptitude and industry influence” permeate the department and have prevented substantive improvements to the nation’s meat and poultry inspection program.

Mary Dixon, a USDA spokeswoman in Washington, responded, saying Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy has done more since January than his predecessors did in the previous 12 years. The difficulty in implementing widespread, rapid change, she said, is that current USDA officials are faced with modernizing a meat inspection system that still uses 1930s technology, in which sight, touch and smell are used to detect invisible pathogens.

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Even so, the coalition predicts that little will have changed at the USDA by early 1994, or at the one-year anniversary of the deadly outbreak of food poisoning linked to undercooked ground beef.

“Year after year, thousands of Americans die and millions become ill from bacterial food-borne illness that can be traced to contaminated meat and poultry,” said Carol Tucker Foreman, Safe Food Coalition coordinator in Washington and a USDA official in the Carter Administration. “Promises are made and broken. People get sick and die, but no real change is made.”

The coalition’s major complaints against USDA include:

* Failure to develop so-called rapid tests to detect microbiological contamination of meat and poultry in slaughter facilities and in processing plants;

* Inability to institute an industry-wide system (known as trace-back) that would allow officials to determine the precise source--ranch, farm or feedlot--of contaminated meat;

* Not enforcing the “zero-tolerance” regulation that requires all carcasses with fecal or ingesta contamination be diverted into fully cooked product or destroyed;

* Bungling an effort to require cooking and handling instructions on all packages of raw meat and poultry.

Foreman made the critical assessment of USDA at a hearing before the House Government Operations Committee, which is reviewing Vice President Gore’s report on “Reinventing Government.”

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In particular, the committee is studying the Clinton Administration’s proposal to move the federal meat inspection program out of USDA and into the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. USDA will offer its testimony tomorrow. The Senate Agriculture Committee is expected to hold hearings on the same issues next week.

“I don’t think it is too early to say that the current USDA team has failed,” said Foreman. “What I did point out (during testimony) was that none of the recommendations they have put forth are even new. And some of the plans proposed have been floating around for 20 years.”

USDA is certainly vulnerable to second-guessing in its efforts to require cooking and handling instructions on all packages of raw meat and poultry. In August, the department attempted to issue the labeling regulation under emergency authority with an expedited public comment period. Any federal department that claims the existence of a regulatory emergency has to meet several requirements set forth by Congress. Three food industry trade groups claimed that USDA did not meet the emergency statutes; a federal judge agreed last month and struck down the department’s entire meat labeling proposal.

Rather than fight the matter in federal courts, USDA is now in the midst of reissuing the original plan under routine public comment periods. The earliest date safe handling labels will be required is April. However, many meat processors and supermarket chains, anticipating the original regulation, are voluntarily providing the cooking instructions, especially on ground meat products.

Foreman said that the USDA should have put out a proposal for safe handling instructions in February, or a month after the E. coli outbreak on the Pacific Coast linked to undercooked hamburger. Such a timetable was reasonable because the department had already announced in 1991 that it was going to go forth with a plan for voluntary cooking instructions. Instead the USDA, under Secretary Espy, did not begin formulating handling instructions until much later in the year, prompted, in part, by a lawsuit filed by Beyond Beef, a Washington-based advocacy group seeking the labels.

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“Secretary Espy was moving full speed ahead on mandating (cooking and handling) labels, but then three food industry groups put up a bureaucratic roadblock,” USDA’s Dixon said. “The Secretary wants the labels on raw meat products but some others obviously do not want them. We are going to take the best possible route to get mandatory labels.”

As for the other complaints, Dixon said that the USDA is enforcing the “zero tolerance” rule and that “no amount of fecal or ingesta materia” is allowed on meat and poultry. She said the department is also aggressively seeking the technology that would allow for instituting rapid tests to detect pathogens in plants. Finally, Dixon said that the USDA is still formulating its proposal to ask Congress for legislation that would give USDA the authority to require all producers and processors to have a data system for tracing back contaminated meat to its source.

Industry groups, while not as critical as the Safe Food Coalition, also expressed impatience with the USDA’s effort to improve meat and poultry inspection.

The Congressional hearings should serve as a “wake-up call” to USDA, encouraging the acceleration of inspection modernization, said J. Patrick Boyle, president of the American Meat Institute in Arlington, Va.

“One problem with (the USDA’s) traditional meat and poultry inspection is that an inordinate amount of time and effort is spent on relatively minor deficiencies that have no relation to public health risk or economic adulteration. This wastes precious resources and puts public health at risk,” said Boyle. “Conditions are not always perfect, of course, and one may ask whether today’s traditional ‘organoleptic’ meat and poultry inspection (by sight, touch and smell) can adequately protect the public. The answer is ‘no,’ not to any appreciable degree.”