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USDA food inspection threatened by automatic U.S. budget cuts
Story Date: 2/12/2013
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Source: Chris Scott, MEATINGPLACE, 2/11/13
As Congressionally mandated budget cuts move closer to their Mar. 1 launch, reports are surfacing that the nation’s food inspection operations will be forced to undergo serious changes that will impact food safety and prices.
A memo distributed by the White House last week indicated that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Food Safety and Inspection Service will be forced to shut down operations for as long as 15 days, a finding USDA officials confirmed to Meatingplace today. The so-called sequestration would force meat processing to shut down for the period when FSIS inspectors are idled, resulting in about $10 billion in losses for the more than 6,200 plants affected.
"The longer we put this thing off, the greater the impact will be," Al Almanza, FSIS adminstrator, told a room full of processors this morning at the North American Meat Association's Meatxpo '13 in Las Vegas. "We're looking at furloughs. They're on the table, but we're doing everything we can to avoid that."
Agency officials add that meat industry workers risk losing more than $400 million in personal wages while consumers could face limited meat and poultry supplies and a possible price increase as a result of shortages. Lawmakers have until the end of this month to adjust the 2011 agreement between Congress and the White House or risk automatically begin trimming $1.2 trillion from the general U.S. budget by 2021.
Monday afternoon a coalition of 38 organizations representing various aspects of animal agriculture, livestock and poultry producers, food processing and manufacturing, retail, international trade and transportation wrote to U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Secretary Tom Vilsack to express strong concerns with the possibility of furloughing the nation's federal meat, poultry and egg products inspectors in the event sequestration goes into effect.
"We understand USDA is considering implementing a sequestration plan that would result in furloughing all the Food Safety and Inspection Service's (FSIS's) meat, poultry and egg products inspectors for 15 days," the groups wrote. "Because of the importance of federal inspection to the production of meat, poultry and egg products, we do not believe furloughing FSIS inspectors to be an appropriate response to sequestration within the framework of the federal meat, poultry and egg products inspection laws. It certainly would not be in the public interest."
For more stories, go to http://www.meatingplace.com/.
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