Anglonautes > Vocapedia > 2000s - 2010s - 2020s > English words - vocabulary - dictionary - encyclopedia > Earth > Farming > Food industry / production > Food safety, Food poisoning, Bacteria, Viruses, Outbreak

“In January, Mr. Obama signed a food safety law that provides broad new authority to the Food and Drug Administration,” wrote Robert Pear in Friday’s Times, in an article about the Congressional appropriations mess. But House Republicans, he added, had voted “to cut the agency’s budget.”

Well, yes, in a nutshell, that is the sad story of the food safety law — the first major change in how the government regulates food safety in over 70 years. But the way the Republicans have dealt with its funding represents more than appropriations problems. It also represents the way they’ve allowed their unyielding antitax, antispend ideology to get in the way of common sense — and the common good.

A few weeks ago, in describing the absurd lawsuit the National Labor Relations Board brought against Boeing — for the crime of opening a plant in nonunion South Carolina — I characterized the N.L.R.B.’s effort as a case study in how Democrats hurt job creation. In that column I promised to return with an equally absurd Republican example. The refusal to properly fund the new food safety law is exactly that.

For years, the food industry and consumer groups have been aligned on the need to modernize the nation’s food safety inspection system. “Food-borne illnesses” — an outbreak of salmonella or E. coli, for instance — are a problem not just for consumers but for industry as well. Recalls are expensive. Sales shrink, even for companies not involved in the recall. Lawsuits ensue. Employees lose their jobs. It can take years to recover from a food scare.

F.D.A. inspections have always been geared toward domestic foodstuffs. But food is now a global industry. “Today,” said Scott Faber, a vice president of the Grocery Manufacturers Association, “we combine ingredients from hundreds of thousands of suppliers in over 200 countries.” Government’s food inspection has not kept pace.

The result was a bill, the Food Safety Modernization Act, whose contours had the approval of both industry and groups like the Center for Science in the Public Interest. It called for an overhaul of the inspection process, and applied tough new standards on food processors, food importers and foreign suppliers. The agency was required to do more foreign inspections, and use approved foreign governments or third-party auditors for importers. It had other important provisions to help prevent outbreaks of food-borne illnesses — and to track them down more quickly when they did occur.

As for paying for this overhaul, the bill included an eminently sensible mechanism: a fee on the industry. Originally set at $2,000 per food facility, it was whittled down to $500, which still would have raised an impressive $300 million. In 2009, when the bill came to a House vote, it passed with bipartisan support; even Michele Bachmann voted for it.

In the Senate, however, with its ever-present threat of Republican filibuster, the fee never had a chance. Never mind that many of the biggest industry players supported the fee. Indeed, many in industry wanted the fee. To the Republicans, “fee” was code for “tax.” When the Senate finally passed the bill in late 2010, the fee was gone.

There’s more. When President Obama submitted his 2012 budget to Congress, he asked for $955 million for food safety, a $120 million increase. The increase was necessary, of course, because without the fee, the F.D.A. was going to be hard-pressed as it began the expensive process of changing how it inspected food.

Needless to say, that increase never had a chance either. With the House firmly in Republican hands, it slashed the agency’s food budget by $87 million, to $750 million. That was a staggering $200 million less than the White House had requested, an amount so low that it will make the F.D.A.’s already difficult task nearly impossible.

Then again, the chairman of the Appropriations subcommittee on agriculture, Jack Kingston of Georgia, doesn’t really seem to think food safety is worth worrying about; he’s on record saying that the nation’s food supply is “99.99 percent safe.” He told The Washington Post last year that the amount of money the agency wanted to fund the new law would be scaled back if it was “significant overreach.” Apparently he thought it was significant overreach.

A few weeks ago, the Senate voted to increase funding just $40 million, which still leaves the F.D.A. short. With so much chaos surrounding the appropriations process, it is impossible to know how this will play out. To put it another way, as the F.D.A. starts to carry out the new law, and industry prepares for it, there is no certainty. This, of course, is exactly what Republicans complain about when they say the Obama administration is hurting job creation.

There is certainty about one thing, though. The next time there is an E. coli outbreak, we’ll know who to blame.

Gail Collins will appear

in tomorrow’s Sunday Review.

Killing Jobs and Making Us Sick, NYT, 16.9.2011,
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/17/
opinion/nocera-killing-jobs-and-making-us-sick.html

Editorial

The Biggest Beef Recall Ever

February 21, 2008
The New York Times

A nauseating video of cows stumbling on their way to a California slaughterhouse has finally prompted action: the largest recall of meat in American history. Westland/Hallmark Meat Company has issued a full recall of more than 143 million pounds of beef produced over the last two years, including 37 million pounds that went to school-lunch programs.

A lot of that beef has already been eaten, and so far, thankfully, there have been no reports of illness. But the question Congress needs to ask is how many people need to get sick or die before it starts repairing and modernizing the nation’s food safety system?

Instead of strengthening the government’s regulatory systems, the Bush administration has spent years cutting budgets and filling top jobs with industry favorites. The evidence of their failures keep mounting: contaminated spinach, poisoned pet food, tainted fish.

At Westland/Hallmark, the latest horrors were secretly videotaped by the Humane Society of the United States, which said it had chosen the plant at random. The video showed workers kicking and using forklifts to force so-called “downer” cows to walk. The government has banned the sale of meat from most of these cows.

Officials have been busy assuring consumers that this massive recall is an “aberration.” “Whistling in the dark” — that is how Caroline Smith DeWaal of the Center for Science in the Public Interest describes such assurances. “The fact that they have failed here so miserably makes you start to question what else is going on that we don’t know about.”

The Westland/Hallmark plant had five federal inspectors on hand, including at least one veterinarian whose job was to make sure that diseased cows did not make it into the meat supply. But where were these inspectors when workers were abusing these poor animals in order to get them to the slaughterhouse? Investigations have already begun in California and Washington.

Whatever the outcome with this particular plant, the larger point is that Congress needs to overhaul the entire food inspection program. That includes giving the Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration more power to demand mandatory recalls. Food producers should be able to track their supplies in order to more quickly root out problems. And foreign suppliers would have to create and implement a workable food safety plan that can be monitored better by federal inspectors.

The present patchwork of modest fines and penalities must also be stiffened.

Senator Richard Durbin and Representative Rosa DeLauro have a more ambitious idea: creating a single, powerful agency to oversee all food safety, instead of the current bureaucratic tangle of inspectors, some for vegetables, some for beef and some for imports. Right now the Agriculture Department oversees the safety of the home-grown beef supply (while also promoting the cattle industry) and the Food and Drug Administration monitors the safety of cattle feed. With Americans increasingly — and legitimately — mistrustful of the food they eat, their proposal is worth serious consideration.