Mad Government Disease
With the ink barely dry on The Harvard Center for Risk Analysis study concluding that bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), or “mad cow” disease, is unlikely to occur in the United States, another study has hit the press with quite a different slant. The General Accounting Office (GAO), the watchdog arm of Congress, is skeptical of current safeguards to keep BSE out of our borders, or even detect it domestically.
It might be noted that the GAO report was requested by Senator Richard Durbin (D-IL) who has wanted to tighten up on oversight of the ban on feeding ruminant material to cows and sheep.
A press release from his Washington office said the GAO report claims that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) “has not acted swiftly to enforce the animal feed ban, and that several noncompliant feed producers had not been reinspected in two years.” GAO, he added, also “suggests that FDA’s inspection data are severely flawed.”
The American Feed Industry Association (AFIA) charged that the GAO report is “characterized by shortcomings and oversights.” It is “in sharp contrast” to other assessments based on science, AFIA said.
The feed and livestock industries continue to point out that not a single case of BSE has occurred in the United States, and that there are all sorts of safeguards in place.
But as Tom Cook, National Renderers Association president, said in the February Render, “BSE continues to dominate our industry in many ways.”
Prophetic words.
Note: President Bush’s FDA budget proposal has a plan for carrying out state/federal inspections of 7,500 feed facilities to see if they’re complying with the federal rule to prevent BSE.
Risky Foreign Business
As the GAO report raising the specter of BSE hit Washington, DC, a front-page Washington Post story proclaimed: USDA Relies on Foreign Inspections – Meat Plants Abroad Fail Sanitation Checks.
With a dateline in Mexico, the article claims that failure of foreign inspections of meat imported into the United States “exposes a blind spot at USDA [U.S. Department of Agriculture]” – the agency that bears new food safety responsibilities in the wake of Sept. 11. The article’s message is clear: Trusting foreign governments – “including ones that have repeatedly failed to get the job done” – imperils American meat eaters.
Take Cover
If the fireworks starting off the 2003 budget debate on Capitol Hill is any indication of things to come, better hunker down. President Bush’s Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill and the long-reigning and powerful chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Robert Byrd (D-WV), set off the first round.
Byrd, still rankling from remarks O’Neill made last year that likened congressional rules “created by just ordinary people” to “Lilliputians tying us to the ground,” expressed distaste for a cartoon to that effect in the administration’s budget report. (Lilliputians are miniature people who manage to immobilize a man by a criss-cross of threads in the literary classic, Gulliver’s Travels.) Byrd labeled such references as “nonsense,” reminding O’Neill that he, Byrd, had seen a lot of treasury secretaries come and go in his half-century in Congress and that not one of them had ever been elected.
When Byrd suggested that O’Neill had been born to wealth, O’Neill retorted, “I started out life in a house without water or electricity, so I don’t cede to you the high moral ground of not knowing what life is like in a ditch.”
Byrd replied that his house had also lacked water and electricity – as well as a telephone and had “a little wooden outhouse.” Then he fired off this warning: “When you are out talking about those ‘ordinary people,’ you’re talking about senators…we’re not going to let you get away with it.”
Big Spender
This year’s USDA budget proposal from the Bush administration is heavy on “homeland security.” Under a section entitled, “Protection of Agriculture and the Food Supply,” departmental expenditures are proposed at nearly $2.4 billion for 2003, up from estimated outlays of almost $2.1 billion this year, compared with not quite $2 billion in 2001. Those increased dollars would be dispersed through the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS), and research.
APHIS would get the largest increase for 2003 – $209 million. Nearly one-fourth of those new monies would go into animal health monitoring to “quickly identify outbreaks that may occur.” And almost one-half of the new funds would go into “pest and disease management,” including some emergency programs.
Agricultural research would receive $34 million more in 2003. Of interest to the livestock and rendering industries: a $2 million increase to focus on BSE, and a $4.5 million hike in funds to develop “sensitive diagnostic methods” and vaccines for foot and mouth disease.
FSIS would get a $28 million boost, with a little more than half that slated to improve technology. The USDA budget proposal notes that “FSIS mainframe computers are over 20 years old and are not able to be linked together to allow sharing of information.” Such outmoded equipment can hamper tracking of food safety problems, thus slowing responses.
Aside from food-security related issues, here are a few other items of interest:
• $2.7 million boost “to conduct slaughter epidemiological surveys and risk prevention activities for small and very small establishments;”
• $l million increase to expand “international news reporting” in Central America, South America, and Asia;
• $9 million increase for research on converting ag waste, by-products, and feedstocks into energy, biobased products, and biobased fuels; and
• Proposal to assess annual licensing fees for meat, poultry, and egg product establishments.
Let the Negotiations Begin
Those Senate and House farm bills have left a lot of negotiating room for conferees trying to come up with something that will satisfy both houses of Congress as well as the administration. Both call for $73.5 billion over 10 years, but the Senate would spend more than 60 percent in the first five years, while the House would spend just under one-half.
The Senate would lower payment caps to farmers from the current $460,000 a year to $275,000; the House would raise them to $550,000. The Senate would ban meatpacker ownership of cattle, hogs, and sheep within 14 days of slaughter; the House passed no such ban.
Briefly
• Spider silk? Scientists have long known that spider silk is a tough and durable fiber, but “spider farms” have been out of the question. Now, however, through genetic engineering, researchers have caused cells in cows and hamsters to produce the protein that makes spider silk. Move over silkworms!
• As President Bill Clinton was nearing the end of his office, he started the Global Food for Education Initiative to provide school lunches for kids overseas. It was a pilot project, drawing funds directly from the treasury – not going through Congress.
Legislators hoped to write it into the House/Senate farm bill during negotiations. However, a GAO report has questioned its effectiveness, charging that it has been costly in 38 nations and that concrete results are lacking.
The program has been endorsed by the diverse likes of former Senator Bob Dole (R-KS) and former Senator George McGovern (D-SD). McGovern, while noting that there may be “legitimate questions” about the program, said it comes down to: “Why not one decent meal every day for every kid in the world? How can you be against that?”
April 2002 Render