The U.S. Department of Agriculture's release last week of a final rule on swine-slaughter inspection has been met with complaints from watchdog groups concerned about public health and the implications of increased production-line speeds.
The USDA has been working to modernize pork processing for years, and it is doing so in its new swine rule by allowing meatpackers to handle some of the duties once assigned to federal inspectors and by permitting them to run production lines faster than the current limit of 1,106 hogs per hour, among other things.
The new rule, which takes effect 60 days after it was released, contains the first major changes to pork processing in the past 50 years, the agency said. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue said the changes ensure food safety, eliminate outdated rules and allow companies to innovate.
Industry groups welcomed the rule changes. Watchdog groups did not.
"With less government oversight over hog slaughter inspection, big meat companies will have the freedom to inspect themselves and push towards their goal of increasing line speeds," Food & Water Watch Executive Director Wenonah Hauter said in a statement. "There's no doubt about it: faster line speeds + less inspection = more food contamination."
Similar to a poultry rule established five years ago, the New Swine Inspection System was proposed in February 2018 to make hog-slaughter inspection more efficient by "making better use of the agency's resources" and by removing regulatory obstacles by "revoking maximum line speeds and allowing establishments flexibility to reconfigure evisceration lines," according to the new rule.
Because the rule requires company workers to sort and remove unfit animals before slaughter and to identify and trim carcass defects after slaughter, the USDA can assign fewer inspectors to "online inspection," documents show, "freeing up agency resources to conduct more offline inspection activities."
Thomas Gremillion, the Consumer Federation of America's director of food policy, said the rule puts "industry profits ahead of public health."
"Higher line speeds, fewer inspectors and no microbiological pathogen performance standards are a recipe for a food safety disaster," Gremillion said in a statement.
Under the current system, pork consumption causes more than half a million cases of food-borne illnesses each year and more than 10% of all salmonella infections in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
When the USDA published its proposed rule a year ago, Gremillion and others said they had problems with it. An agency pilot program to modernize pork production that operated for more than a decade failed to demonstrate improved food safety, even though the USDA claimed it did, Gremillion said in a statement.
"That risk assessment should have undergone peer review before USDA proposed its rule," he said. "It did not -- Instead, the peer review took place after the comment period closed on the proposed rule, and three of five reviewers concluded that the assessment was irredeemably flawed."
The USDA also said the faster line speeds would not affect plant workers. But David Michaels, a former Department of Labor administrator from 2009 to 2017, said he found that hard to believe.
During his time working for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Michaels was involved in discussions on a proposal that would have sped up the slaughter and processing lines in poultry plants. At the time, OSHA opposed the proposal because of concerns about an increased risk of injury and illness among workers. In the end, the final rule did not include a provision to increase production-line speeds in poultry plants.
"I am strongly opposed to any provision that would allow employers to increase the number of forceful repetitions workers are required to perform," he said in a letter dated April 30, 2018. "This will, without doubt, increase worker injuries and illnesses."
In the letter, he also said the cost-benefit analysis of the new pork rule is lacking because it does not attempt to include data on the costs associated with an increase in injuries.
The final rule was tested at five pork-processing plants owned by JBS USA, Smithfield and others. Under the rule, the USDA has the authority to slow or stop production lines. Packers are not required to adopt the new system.
Earlier this summer, USDA Inspector General Phyllis Fong opened an investigation into the agency's new hog rule, examining the quality of worker-safety data used to develop the rule. A month ago, two U.S. lawmakers asked her to broaden the investigation to include the rule's effects on food safety and animal welfare.
Tyson Foods Inc. and other producers are supportive of the agency's efforts to modernize swine slaughter.
In a letter sent May 2, 2018, Joel Coble, Tyson Fresh Meats Inc.'s senior director of food safety and quality assurance, said the company works to reduce the health and safety risks that employees face on a daily basis. Currently, Tyson Foods operates six pork-processing plants, slaughtering about 424,000 hogs per week.
"We remain focused on appropriate staffing to ensure safety, such as adequate staffing for line speeds that allow team members to stop the line at any time for an out of control process," he wrote.
"Revoking maximum line speeds during evisceration will not affect our aspiration to achieve zero work-related injuries. Conversely, we believe that under [the new inspection system] the ability to reconfigure the slaughter system will allow innovation to flourish."
Business on 09/26/2019