That U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Inspector General’s (IG) report saying that the agency had slip-ups in its monitoring of imported meat products set off gnashing of bureaucrat teeth – and yet more rules. The report looked at how safeguards for foot and mouth disease hadn’t always held tight, but the implications for holes in “mad cow disease” (bovine spongiform encephalopathy – BSE) controls were obvious.
The ink on the IG report was hardly dry before USDA announced a new rule that requires companies importing animal products to certify they are from a BSE-free country; say how those products were processed and handled; and indicate what species of animal they contain. “Animal products” mean all processed proteins, fats and oils, flours, meals, and pet foods.
A manual record-keeping system and the lack of communication between two USDA agencies are at the root of the problem, said the report. That manual system, used by USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) cannot, the report charged, “reliably track the status of shipments” that come into U.S. ports. Furthermore, APHIS, which enforces import regs, must communicate with another USDA agency, the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS), which inspects meat.
An example of failure: 32,000 pounds of sausage casings that were supposedly en route from APHIS to FSIS in Houston wound up in a commercial warehouse elsewhere in Texas. Some of that product was discovered to be prohibited and destroyed.
The National Institutes of Health is also more than doubling its current budget for research on diseases such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a brain-wasting disease thought to be caused from eating BSE-infected meat. Note also that researchers at the University of California at San Francisco say the feds have given the go-ahead for them to study the effects of a drug combination on patients terminally ill with a disease similar to that caused by “mad cow disease.” The drug mix: a malaria drug and one for schizophrenia.
And as if “mad cow disease” weren’t enough of a problem, along comes the environmental activist group Greenpeace with a headline in its Planet Ark Environmental News: “Australia on alert for ‘Mad Snake Disease.’” Two pythons, native to Australia, showed up with a brain-wasting disease.
Is it the Chicken or the Egg?
In a recent USDA Broadcasters Letter is the following headline: “Marketing Support for Egg Industry.” The brief item then goes on to say that USDA announced its intention to buy “approximately $10 million of poultry meat products for school lunch and other domestic feeding programs. This purchase will assist the poultry industry while providing a food commodity that is popular in USDA’s child nutrition and other domestic feeding programs.”
Up, Up, and Away
While demand for U.S. exports of American manufactured products has dipped, the value of U.S. agricultural products has gone up. The U.S. ag trade surplus for the first three-quarters of this year was $11.1 billion, $2.2 billion more than a year ago.
Hides and skins jumped the most, with sales up by $400 million. Feedstuffs increased $280 million.
Don’t Give It Away
Ten former secretaries of agriculture are for beefing up trade promotion and entering into more free-trade agreements. Two of those former USDA chiefs, Democrat Dan Glickman, secretary of agriculture from l995 until early this year, and Republican Clayton Yeutter, secretary from l989-91 (and U.S. trade representative before that), joined current ag chief Ann M. Veneman on the airwaves to ask for Trade Promotion Authority (TPA).
Note, however, that while most ag groups support the idea of free trade, they caution that entering a free-trade agreement doesn’t mean “giving away the store.” A case in point: Australia has asked the U.S. trade representative to start free-trade agreement negotiations, but the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (NCBA) worries that opening up U.S. markets to Australian beef would not result in reciprocal opening up for U.S. beef exports.
Australia, said NCBA, “claims to have one of the most transparent human and plant/animal health risk assessment processes in the world, yet it constantly deviates from its official procedures, and invents new ‘reviews’ that endlessly delay import decisions.”
Can’t We All Just Get Along?
The Europeans aren’t too happy with the United States right now. A poll taken by the International Herald Tribune and the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press in Washington shows that the British, French, Italians, and Germans strongly disagree with President Bush’s decision to withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol on global warming as well as his decision to pursue a national defense missile system.
The poll, said Andrew Kohut of the Pew Center, indicates that Bush “hasn’t gotten off to a good start in Europe.” Kohut added that Europeans also might hold his Texas roots against him. “He’s a Texan,” he pointed out, “that makes him an American squared.”
Note: The European Union (EU) is threatening to ask the World Trade Organization (WTO) to slap $4 billion in trade sanctions on the United States unless we do something about a tax-credit program for U.S. corporations that the EU says violates international trade law. That program allows U.S. firms to shelter some overseas income. The EU has been challenging those tax breaks for years, but now that the WTO has ruled them illegal, the EU is flexing its muscles.
U.S. Trade Representative Robert B. Zoellick has warned that any trade sanctions as large as $4 billion worth would be like “dropping a nuclear bomb” on world trade. And the U.S. Congress, he said, would be quick to retaliate against the EU.
Managing Government
The Bush team is going after the federal work force – proposing that more services be contracted out, that retirement incentives be more widespread, and that agencies be freed from laws “that get in the way of work” such as one that bars USDA from shutting a state rural development office. At least that’s the goal of the administration’s “Freedom to Manage” legislation before Congress.
Mitchell E. Daniels, Jr., Bush’s head of the Office of Management and Budget, is the one orchestrating the effort to streamline and modernize. He admits it’s a daunting task. “I think for some of our folks in federal government,” he said, “their idea of a stretch goal is going from l0 to 8 carbon copies on a purchase order.”
October 2001 Render