Agriculture Department Wants Hog Slaughterhouses
Inspecting Themselves, Less Government Oversight
By Sarah Okeson
Trump’s Department of Agriculture wants to cut the number of federal inspectors who
examine slaughtered pigs for signs of disease and unsanitary conditions and
shift some of the work to slaughterhouse employees.
The proposal said the changes could reduce the amount hogs
contaminated with Salmonella bacteria that cause food poisoning, but a similar
system for killing chickens resulted in one USDA inspector looking at as many as three
birds a second and more chicken slaughter plants failing the
agency’s standards for salmonella.
“It is irresponsible for the USDA to
expand a radical change to food safety responsibility in the pork industry
based on a pilot program that clearly failed to show that allowing companies to
inspect themselves can produce safe food,” said Wenonah Hauter, executive director
of Food & Water Watch.
Traditionally, inspectors examine the head, internal organs and body of each animal for signs of disease and contamination. They feel the lymph nodes of the large intestine and lower abdomen for tuberculosis nodules, check the intestines for parasites and the kidneys for inflammation.
In the 1990s, the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service launched a pilot program to have slaughterhouse employees take over some of the time-intensive inspections before the federal inspectors look at the dead animals. The rationale is that this would free up federal inspectors to “perform critical tasks that have a direct impact on food safety.”
Elsa Murano, the undersecretary for food
safety when the pilot program was approved, serves
on the board of Hormel Foods which is associated with three of the five plants that
were part of the pilot program. In February, she owned about $3 million in Hormel stock.
Trump considered Murano for the job of agriculture secretary but
ultimately chose former Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue. He has not nominated anyone for the food safety job at
the USDA.
The National
Pork Producers Council, which spent $1.8 million in federal lobbying last year, has
supported the proposal. Ken Maschhoff, the former president, said
it would introduce “new pork production efficiencies while
encouraging the deployment of new food safety technologies.” New pork
plants are being built under the assumption the
proposed regulations will take effect.
The proposed changes would let plants ditch federal limits on how fast pigs can be killed if
they choose the new inspection system. Under the current system,
slaughterhouses move hog carcasses on the conveyor belt at about 977 an
hour or about 16 a minute.
Meatpacking jobs are dangerous with higher rates of illness
and injuries than in manufacturing and all private industry.
Concerns about worker safety helped defeat a proposal to increase line speed
for poultry, but that was under former President Barack Obama. The USDA recently denied another request to
remove the speed limit for killing poultry.
“Speeding up the number of hogs processed each hour in a plant
will result in an already dangerous industry becoming even more dangerous,” said Deborah Berkowitz of the National Employment Law
Project.
ACTION
BOX/What You Can Do About It
Comment online about the proposal or mail comments to
Docket Clerk, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Food Safety and Inspection
Service, Patriots Plaza 3, 1400 Independence Avenue SW, Mailstop 3782, Room
8-163A, Washington, D.C. 20250-3700. Please use the agency name and docket
number FSIS-2016-0017 for comments submitted by mail.
Comments must be submitted by May 2.
Call
Agriculture Sec. Sonny Perdue at 202-720-2791 to ask him why the USDA is
promoting a system that will use fewer federal inspectors to examine
slaughtered pits or write him at U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1400
Independence Avenue SW, Washington, D.C. 20250.
Food
& Water Watch can be reached at 202-683-2500 or
info@fwwatch.org.