It seems consumers have been inundated lately with product safety recalls. From toys containing lead paint to contaminated pet food that alarmed millions of parents and pet owners in the last year. Now the safety of the blood thinner heparin is being questioned after deficiencies were discovered at an overseas manufacturing facility.
Each of those cases involved imported products. In December I introduced a bipartisan food safety bill that would strengthen the import inspection and testing of imported food products to protect American consumers.
Closer to home, America’s food supply received an unprecedented wake-up call in February with the largest meat recall in U.S. history. The announcement that 143 million pounds of beef would be pulled from the marketplace accompanied other revelations.
With passage of the Meat Inspection Act of 1906, Congress mandated inspection of livestock before and after slaughter and established standards for sanitary conditions at meatpacking facilities.
Thanks in part to beefed-up congressional oversight and federal regulations and inspections, conditions in America’s meatpacking facilities have improved greatly since the turn of the last century. Most recently, the USDA has implemented new safeguards and added layers of protections to further preserve the integrity and safety of the food supply from meat tainted with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE). Commonly known as mad cow disease, the U.S. stepped up its inspections processes after the first official case of a BSE cow in the United States was confirmed in 2003.
Last summer, the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service issued a final rule to handle the inspections process for non-ambulatory, so-called “downer” cattle. If an animal becomes ill or disabled after the initial inspection, the meatpacking facility is required to notify the FSIS personnel on-site. The California meatpacker in question was found in violation of this rule. That led to the 143 million pounds of meat involved in the Class 2 recall, one-third of which had been distributed to federal programs, including the School Lunch Program.
As a family farmer, I understand how a crisis in consumer confidence can directly impact the livelihoods of farm families working hard day in and day out to produce quality, wholesome and affordable food. As a consumer, I understand the unsettling questions that come to mind when a food product is found potentially unsafe for the dinner table.
Aside from the obvious public health consequences, a tainted food supply also would wreak havoc with international trade and inflict a damaging ripple effect all along the food chain. America’s beef industry suffered significant losses when Japan, China and South Korea refused U.S. beef imports following the confirmation of a BSE cow in the United States. I’ve fought hard to win back market access to these countries.
USDA has an investigation underway to find out what went wrong at the Chino, California-based meatpacker. Most importantly USDA needs to determine if this was an isolated incident or a systemic problem. I’m taking stock of the situation from Capitol Hill. Congress must keep watch to make sure resources are being used wisely to regulate meat safety. I want to see that tax dollars are paying conscientious inspectors and that they’re doing the job they are hired to do. If government inspectors were asleep at the switch, they should be fired immediately.
From my watchdog position in the U.S. Senate, I’ll continue to keep the federal bureaucracy on a short leash to hold it accountable to the American people. That includes protecting hard-earned tax dollars from fraud, demanding answers from the FDA about its foreign drug inspection program and fixing what went wrong with the federal surveillance and inspections process at the California packinghouse so that it doesn’t happen again.
The USDA’s seal of approval is like a covenant with the American consumer. When consumers go to the grocery store, eat out at a restaurant or send their kids off to school with lunch money, they deserve to have every confidence that a USDA-certified ground beef patty is not only delicious, but safe to eat.