Obama Budget Plans on Replacing USDA Poultry Inspectors with Industry Self Regulation - RealNews

[Divernan]

29. Cuts $30 mil./year to public health-adds $260 mil/yr. poultry industry profits.

For the Obama administration, this is a no-brainer. Will the White House start raising organic chickens next to their PR vegetable garden? You know, for the White House kitchen?

http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=10052

" In President Obama's budget presented on Wednesday, one of the provisions calls for cutting back on food inspection, particularly of poultry, cutting back federal inspectors. Now joining us to talk about why this matters is Tony Corbo. He's a senior lobbyist for the food campaign at Food and Water Watch. He's responsible for food-related legislative regulatory issues that come before Congress and the executive branch.

"What brought this whole regulation about, this proposed regulation, is the fact that Obama two years ago issued an executive order asking the federal government agencies to look at regulations that could be eliminated and to have industry weigh in as to which regulations they consider to be onerous or redundant. And, of course, the poultry industry stepped up to the plate and said, we want fewer inspectors in these plants.
"What's wrong with that is that having USDA inspectors in these plants provides an unbiased view of what is going on in those plants from a food safety standpoint, from a sanitation standpoint. And so what the administration is proposing is to turn over a major proportion of the inspection duties over to the companies, where the company employees will be doing the jobs of the USDA inspectors. There'll be a token USDA inspection force left in these plants.

Read the whole article at the link and you'll think twice about purchasing raw chicken anywhere. We're looking at a trillion dollar deficit, and this change, while greatly endangering public health, will save $30 million a year, BUT allow the poultry industry to gain $260 million a year by reducing health regulations and increasing production. The token USDA inspector left in a plant will have 175 chickens per minute whizzing by on a conveyor belt.

And here's the real kicker. The article details that the government has been running a pilot program with the self-inspecting for several years.
When the administration proposed their regulation, they had a report doing an evaluation of these pilot plants. And it showed the last two years of data that they collected, that the pilot plants had actually higher salmonella rates than the conventionally inspected plants. And lo and behold, just this past month--USDA does a monthly report on the testing that the government does in these plants to test to see if the salmonella rates are either high or low, and two of the pilot plants showed up as failing the salmonella test.

So here's the ultimate irony. The administration keeps on going around and saying that this new model, this new inspection model is going to be able to reduce salmonella, and yet all of the evidence points the other way.