The new Department of Homeland Security now dominates non-military federal expenditures. Food, feed, and rendering plants are busy complying with the Food and Drug Administration on records, traceability, import inspections, and other requirements to implement the Bioterrorism Act that President Bush signed into law June 12, 2002. Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns recently announced the availability of model food security plans and training that meat, poultry, and egg processing plants can utilize to strengthen security measures and prevent potential acts of intentional contamination. Congress is considering a “Bioshield II” bill that would dictate additional counter-measures against agroterrorism. Security has taken on new meaning in many venues – protection from intentional contamination by terrorists or natural or accidental hazards.
Not too long ago, food security was the issue of whether people had enough to eat – whether they were served by a sustainable system that was reasonably likely to withstand drought, war, or mismanagement. Hopefully, all of this investment in preparedness in the name of the “new” type of food security will mean such terrorism threats will never materialize, but it may not help much with the availability of food in poor countries. It is important that we not add so many costs to the system that food becomes too expensive for more people. Government must regulate and industry must do their part, but these requirements should be proportional to the risk.
Biosecurity and Food Safety
More relevant and immediate biosecurity threats to human health have to do with normal microbiological, viral, or other biological challenges to which agriculture may be more accustomed. Headlines tell horror stories of Marburg hemorrhagic fever virus in Africa, avian influenza virus in Asia, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in Europe, or Salmonella and Campylobacter on poultry meat. With many of the issues, the threat to human health may be very small, but it sounds good as a cause – often in the form of the latest unfounded attack on the U.S. food system because people take our incredible array of low priced, high quality food for granted.
Meanwhile, in the United States, a disproportionate amount of money is spent both privately and publicly defending against the barely perceptible risk of BSE. The meat, feed, and rendering industries spend millions of dollars to prevent microbial growth on livestock feed, even though the connection to meat contamination is tenuous, not to mention that consumer meat handling and cooking are more important determinants of final safety. We are forced to spend time and money proving negatives or explaining processes in answer to uninformed charges from people with political agendas.
In the name of safer food, the Food Safety Inspection Service (FSIS) recently announced they plan to shift focus from beef to poultry in order to drive down the incidence of Salmonella in raw poultry products to “mirror what the agency has done with E. coli O:157 in beef.” Never mind that E. coli O:157 is one pathogen in an endless sea of E. coli – its eradication is a responsible and possible thing to do – but leaving Salmonella unspecified includes mostly ubiquitous and harmless species among the 2,300 serovars. If the target was pathogenic Salmonella species, rather than the entire genus, the new strategy might be less futile.
Everything mentioned above needs to be done, some for actual human safety reasons, some for marketing, and some in the spirit of “the customer is always right.” However, we should not be distracted from setting priorities based on real risk and preparing for new challenges in the future. In doing everything demanded by regulators and customers today, we may be so busy we don’t see what’s coming next.
What is Coming Next?
Physicist Nils Bohr said, “Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future.” Another anonymous wise guy said, “A good forecaster is not smarter than everyone else, he merely has his ignorance better organized.” Risk of being wrong notwithstanding, two things already mentioned could have a lasting impact on the future of the rendering industry. Both are familiar – avian influenza and Salmonella. Maybe the best quote is from the statistician who said, “I have seen the future and it is very much like the present, only longer.” Though they are not new, avian influenza and Salmonella can affect the rendering industry in new ways.
Without preparation and planning, diseases scary to the public could render the rendering industry strictly an environmental service industry rather than a combination of service and transformation of otherwise waste streams into valuable products. This has happened in France where cattle by-products are rendered into fats that are used to burn the proteins, the air is scrubbed, and even the wash water is distilled before discharged. No products leave the property. Can this happen in the United States even if we don’t have BSE? Absolutely. Can the rendering industry thrive and profit in this scenario? Probably. Does it have to happen that way? No.
Avian Influenza
The risk of global spread of the close-to-human avian influenza now in Asia is real. This strain, with its increased human risk along with panic that could rival that caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, a couple of years ago, raises the stakes significantly.
The rendering industry was snubbed in the U.S. outbreaks of avian influenza and exotic Newcastle disease in 2002 and 2003 because of concerns of disease spread from transport of infected carcasses and use of rendered products. Our industry was not trusted to clean and disinfect trucks and to prevent cross-contamination of feed ingredients. However, alternative carcass disposal methods were very expensive and environmentally undesirable.
What can be done to change both the realities and perceptions so renderers can participate in the resolution of disease outbreaks? If the marketing challenges of products from avian influenza depopulations are too great to overcome, can services still be offered by renderers? Can the industry capture some of the money buried in landfills?
Salmonella
Will this issue ever go away? No. In fact, the rendering industry’s successes in the past, both in drastically decreasing the incidence of positive testing products and in fending off misplaced blame on rendered products, may have given us a false sense of security on this issue. FSIS’s new emphasis to drive down the incidence of Salmonella in raw poultry products may re-open this issue and trigger increased scrutiny on the rendering industry. Meat processors are eager to pass the responsibility back upstream to the farms, and the producers will be eager to pass it up further to the feed mills expecting all their ingredients to be problem free.
Salmonella issues could make compliance with the 1997 feed rule look easy. We are talking about organisms that are extremely easy to kill, but the nasty little things have a habit of coming back. They can fly on the wings of wild birds. They can seem like they come from nowhere. The rendering industry will have to redouble its efforts to make clean products and to keep them clean, as well as fending off unfair finger pointing and unneeded regulation.
Any Other Good News?
How about $3.00 a gallon gas? I never thought the laws of supply and demand combined with the greed of OPEC members would let it happen again to this extent, but from mid-March to mid-April in northern Virginia and Washington, DC, there was a 40-cent per gallon rise in gasoline prices. This is likely to trigger inflationary pressure, increased transportation costs, and widen the demand for biodiesel. It could change the variables in profitability equations, change processing costs, require a different product mix, or distract your attention from other impacts. Worse, economic pressures could tempt managers to take shortcuts on washing trucks, heating wash water, or making necessary repairs.
What Can We Do?
In the face of looming problems, I often lapse into a discussion on the virtues of strategic planning. Strategic planning is a management tool to help an organization focus its energy and to assess and adjust its direction in response to a changing environment. The one thing that can be predicted with assurance is that we will continue to live in a changing environment.
You need to examine the global, national, and local factors you think will impact your business. You need to prepare to respond, shift, and to re-allocate resources so whatever comes your way can be minimized on the negative side or turned into a positive.
Here are some things to consider:
• Review security measures – don’t be an easy target for terrorism or mischief.
• Review biosecurity measures – can your company earn the trust of animal health officials to be part of the solution in disease control?
• Review process controls – if the world shifts with new attention on avian influenza and/or Salmonella, will your customers continue to trust your cross-contamination prevention procedures? (Implementing the Animal Protein Producers Industry Code of Practice will help here.)
• Review your business model – does everything you do make sense with new economic variables, including high priced fuel, variable trade barriers, proposed regulation, and bioterroism, biosecurity, and food safety issues?
The future might require new ways of doing things, new investments, and different perspectives, but it is likely also to be teeming with opportunities for those who can see them coming or be flexible enough to respond quickly and appropriately.
June 2005 Render