Congressional investigators find fault with government oversight of meat, poultry plants

Friday, September 20th 2002, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

WASHINGTON (AP) _ A congressional audit has found that the public is at risk for illnesses from tainted meat and poultry because the Agriculture Department is not doing enough to oversee slaughterhouses and processing plants.

The longer the department's Food and Safety Inspection Service ``allows plants to remain out of compliance with regulatory requirements, the greater the risk that unsafe food will be produced and marketed,'' the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, said Thursday.

But Agriculture Department officials said they already have identified many of the problems cited by the GAO and taken steps to correct them.

The GAO report follows complaints by some lawmakers that the department, through its inspection service, has not adequately explained how it handled a recall this summer of 19 million pounds of contaminated hamburger meat.

The report calls on Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman to demand that inspectors do their jobs and that plants react promptly to correct violations.

Sen. Tom Harkin, the Senate Agriculture Committee chairman, said in a statement: ``Such clear evidence that food safety regulations are not being enforced is alarming, to say the least.''

Harkin, D-Iowa, who requested the report along with the committee's top Republican, Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, said the department has had enough time to work out problems with the inspection system that was adopted in 1996.

``They're still way behind in the race to protect consumers,'' he said. ``According to this report, we have several companies in this country repeatedly failing to meet food safety requirements and USDA is standing by and watching. That is a problem.''

Elsa Murano, the department's undersecretary for food safety, said steps already are being taken to ensure that all inspectors are properly trained.

``Many of the weaknesses highlighted by the GAO were ones also documented by my new leadership team. Importantly, we have already begun addressing the issues identified,'' she said in a statement. ``We are taking steps to ensure that all inspectors are properly trained.''

The report found that inspectors failed to:

_Consistently identify and document repeated failures of plants to find contamination hazards, as required under a system the department phased in from January 1998 through January 2000.

_Determine whether the hazard-detection systems are based on sound science, because the inspectors lack that expertise, and only about 1 percent of more than 5,000 plants nationwide had been analyzed for scientific weaknesses.

_Find any hazard-detection violations in 55 percent of the plants during 2001, a figure that struck even department officials as unrealistic because it seemed too high.

The report reveals the agency's reluctance to crack down on plants that have violated safety laws, said Carol Tucker Foreman, director of the Consumer Federation of America's Food Policy Institute.

``They have decided to put the desires of the ground beef industry ahead of the safety of American consumers,'' she said.

The agency should set deadlines for when it will shut down plants found in violation, Tucker Foreman said.

On the other side of the debate, the industry said meat contamination is declining and the Agriculture Department is improving its inspections.

While the report offers criticism, ``it is not a condemnation of the U.S. meat and poultry inspection program,'' J. Patrick Boyle, president of the American Meat Institute, said in a statement.

Boyle said the agency needs more funding to pay for training its inspectors.