There are three horse slaughter plants in the United States – two in Texas and one in Illinois. With the exception of a tiny domestic market, all horse meat moves to Europe or Asia, slaughtered under a fee-for-service deal with USDA to gain the department’s seal of inspection approval. Nearly 200 national, regional, and state groups – many in mainstream agriculture – oppose the legislation because it ends the only federally regulated means of euthanizing 90,000 unwanted and neglected horses each year.
Well, in mid-September, HR 503, a bill by Representatives Ed Whitfield (R-KY) and John Sweeney (R-NY), with about half the House as cosponsors, was heard separately by both the House Energy and Commerce Committee and the House Agriculture Committee. Energy and Commerce reported the bill out of committee without amendments or a recommendation for action. The House Agriculture Committee not only reported the bill out with a recommendation of no action, but also amended the bill significantly to make it the responsibility of USDA to take possession of abandoned horses and to make the law applicable only to New York and Kentucky as a test program.
When the bill reached the floor and after six hours of debate (no kidding), it passed on a lopsided vote of 263-147. Here’s the $64,000 question: Which version of the bill passed the House? The bill as introduced – as was the plan and the bill everyone assumed was on the floor – or the amended version that came out of House Ag?
The reason everyone is scratching their individual and collective heads is because the formal legislative paperwork sent by the House Speaker’s office to the Secretary of the Senate refers to the version of the bill amended by the House Agriculture Committee. After a big “oops,” House Majority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) took quiet floor action to formally request the Senate return what his office calls “the wrong paperwork,” so the correct paperwork can be reconveyed to the Senate.
As of this writing, eight Senators have “holds” on HR 503, meaning the Senate can’t act on the bill until all eight Senators remove their individual objections. This is a good thing since Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) accommodated the House and quietly returned “the wrong paperwork.”
Congress recesses for electioneering on September 29. Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA), without making a judgment as to the horse slaughter bill’s worthiness, said there isn’t the time or the inclination to act on the bill before the recess.
But this whole situation has given congressional critics more fodder. As one wag put it, “The do-nothing Congress is apparently also the read-nothing Congress.” Any way you cut it, the horse slaughter ban appears dead for this Congress.
Numbers Talk
The National Renderers Association (NRA) has received a lot of press coverage of late, much of it never mentioning NRA by name. The association’s anonymity is due to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) coming clean about the reason it has yet to propose a final rule amending the existing federal ruminant feed rule. The reason? The rule’s ultimate price tag. Why no mention of NRA in most stories? FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine (CVM) tells the press and other interested parties it’s reworking its economic impact numbers due to “industry comment.”
That industry comment came in the form of an extensive, detailed Informa Economics report submitted as part of NRA’s formal comments, a report that shows the actual impact of FDA’s proposal to be more than ten-fold the estimate provided by FDA in its proposal.
The “economic impact on industry number” is important because if the overall impact is $100 million or more, then the proposal is deemed in federal parlance to be a “major rule.” If a major rule, then paperwork reduction, small business impact, and a slew of other requirements kick in prior to the rule being finalized.
Apparently, FDA didn’t take seriously the messages provided to the agency by NRA delegations during the development of the proposed rule. Those messages included “warnings,” if you will, that if FDA’s proposal makes it uneconomical for renderers to pick up dead cattle – requiring the brains and spinal cord to be removed from all deadstock – it would likely become just as uneconomical to run trucks to pick up other dead livestock and poultry. For just cattle, the amount of material involved totals two to four billion pounds.
FDA assumed there would be no significant adverse affect on the rendering industry from its original proposal, going so far as to state on a couple of occasions that a portion of the industry would simply dedicate itself to disposal. However, in an interview with Dow Jones Newswires, CVM Director Dr. Stephen Sundlof said, “What we heard back was that no, that’s probably not the case,” adding that only a minority of companies would invest in the equipment or take the time or effort to remove brains and spinal cords from deadstock.
As another CVM official put it to this author at a meeting we both attended but that had nothing to do with the proposed rule, and I’m paraphrasing, “We’re revisiting the numbers. Apparently our number is too low. I’m guessing the real impact is somewhere between our number and industry’s.”
The agency doesn’t do the economic analysis in-house; it farms it out to an analysis firm, then reviews, approves, and resubmits. However, so much additional number crunching is apparently necessary that the most recent estimate of FDA’s publication date for its proposed final rule is some time during the first quarter of 2007.
Some industry insiders continue to believe FDA may never publish a final rule, but will use USDA’s enhanced surveillance statistics and its related and reworked Harvard bovine spongiform encephalopathy risk analysis to justify a lack of need for the United States to take additional, expensive steps to reduce a level of risk experts agree is already miniscule.
As to “pressure” on the United States to publish a proposed final rule because Canada has published its final regulation and North America needs to “harmonize” its systems, well, attempts at harmonization with Canada are no longer even a consideration, according to a number of government sources.
View from Washington - October 2006 Render