Minnesota Farmers Union

(July 10, 2009) - The presence of salmonella in peanut butter this last winter prompted calls for a number of solutions to the inspection failure, including one for the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) to take over all food inspection and another for the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to adopt the USDA Food Inspection Service's Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) method of inspection.

As House Agriculture Committee Chair Collin Peterson said, "We have jurisdiction over meat and catfish. FDA has jurisdiction over everything else. We're not perfect, but our track record is a helluva lot better at USDA than it is at FDA."

After the Jack in the Box E. coli outbreak in 1993, the USDA decided to move to the HACCP system of inspection. Based on the idea that the plant operator knows the plant better than the USDA, the responsibility for designing an inspection system was turned over to each individual plant.

According to John Munsell, Manager, Foundation for Accountability in Regulatory Enforcement (FARE), when USDA "officials initially described HACCP to the industry in the mid-90's, the agency made the following enticing promises:

(April 3, 2009) - The recent salmonella outbreak traced to a Peanut Corporation of America (PCA) plant, last year's e. coli outbreaks in fresh vegetables, and numerous meat recalls have underlined the need for an improved food inspection system in the US. To remedy the problems individuals from Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut to Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack have called for the establishment of a single food inspection agency to replace the fragmented system that presently exists.

We have seen what can happen when the system breaks down and tainted product reaches the marketplace. Demand for peanut butter fell following news of the problems at the PCA plant. This spring peanut farmers are left wondering if demand will recover sufficiently for it to be worth their while to plant peanuts this year. Before one of last year's e. coli outbreaks was finally traced to Mexican-grown raw peppers, acre upon acre of California tomatoes went unpicked as consumers reduced their purchases of fresh tomatoes.

Even worse than the economic impact on producers is the death and illness attributable to tainted food.

(February 11, 2009) - One of the weekly features broadcast by a local Knoxville, TN television station announces the names of the restaurants that achieved the highest scores on recent health department inspections, They also announce the names, scores, and reasons for those scores of the restaurants that were given the lowest scores by the health department. In addition, the law requires that all restaurants post the latest inspection reports in plain view of the eating public.

While our health department and others around the country have a system in place that makes the results of their inspections of restaurants that serve 100s of people available to the public, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has no such system in place for firms that serve hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people.

When the Georgia Agriculture Department, under contract from the FDA, found serious sanitation problems on one of their inspections of the Peanut Corporation of America facility-the one later found to be responsible for the recent Salmonella outbreak-the plant was not shut down and required to correct the deficiencies. In addition, no word went out to the purchasers of the product from that plant.