March 25, 2014
 
Members of Congress recently asked Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack, to suspend the proposed Modernization of Poultry Inspection Rule, according to an article by Food Safety News available here.  The Washington Post also reported on the story here.
 
“While we strongly support modernizing our food safety system and making it more efficient, modernization should not occur at the expense of public health, worker safety, or animal welfare,” wrote the group of 68 legislators, led by U.S. Representatives Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), Jim Moran (D-VA), Louise Slaughter (D-NY), and Bennie Thompson (D-MS). 
 
The legislators also echoed concerns raised by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) report from August 2013.  The GAO report found that the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) had “not thoroughly evaluated the performance of each of the three pilot projects” due to limitations in the analysis of data from chicken plants and a lack of report on the turkey plants.
 
In response to the GAO report, Elisabeth Hagen, then Undersecretary of Food Safety, agreed and stated that when USDA issues the final rule, “FSIS will present the updated analyses, including the cost benefit analysis, in a manner that will facilitate public understanding of information used to support the rulemaking.”
 
Vilsack stated that those at FSIS “are confident in saying that there has been an increase of compliance with safety standards.”  In addition, he said the program would require “more inspections offline where we know pathogens attach, it would require more verification of compliance with standard operating procedures and with HACCP requirements…it would require new microbiological testing and record keeping that currently doesn’t exist, and it would make strong recommendations relative to worker safety.”

 

For more information on food safety, please visit the National Agricultural Law Center’s website here.
 
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