Source: Rita Jane Gabbett, MEATINGPLACE, 9/13/13


More than three months after USDA’s Office of the Inspector General took the agency to task for lax oversight of the HAACP-Based Inspection Models Project (HIMP) operating for the past 15 years in five U.S. pork plants, an agency official is defending the program in the face of a Washington Post article that also calls the program into question.

In an interview with Meatingplace, Phil Derfler, deputy administrator of USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service, said that there is no cause for concern about the program, that USDA is evaluating it between now and March 2014 and that until the evaluation is completed, there will be no decision on either proposing a rule to expand the program across all U.S. pork plants (as the agency has for poultry) or shut the program down.

He took issue with the headline the Post used — “USDA pilot program fails to stop contaminated meat” — as flat-out wrong, adding that the article itself notes that contaminated meat did not leave plants because it was caught at the end of the processing line by government inspectors.

The OIG report in May had noted, “Although HIMP was intended to improve food safety, we found that three of the 10 plants cited with the most NRs (noncompliance records) from fiscal years 2008 to 2011 were HIMP plants. In fact, the swine plant with the most NRs during this timeframe was a HIMP plant — with nearly 50 percent more NRs than the plant with the next highest number.”

The more you check, the more you find
Derfler said the reason inspectors are finding more fecal material on products (which are then removed from the processing line) is that, relieved of non-food safety tasks that are re-assigned to company employees in HIMP plants, the government inspectors are actually making more checks for fecal material and therefore are finding more of it.

“Because of the way HIMP plants are structured, because of the way the sorting is done up the line, our inspectors get to focus on food safety issues,” Derfler said. “We do many, many, many more checks for fecal material in HIMP plants than we do in traditional plants, so it is not surprising that we are finding more in HIMP plants because that is what our inspection personnel are focusing on. [The Post] article is a testament in some ways that the system is working, rather than the opposite.”

When it comes to fecal material, if you divide the findings at the HIMP plants by the number of checks done, the rate is the same as it is in non-HIMP swine plants, a USDA spokeswoman added.

Similar to the HIMP inspection system USDA has proposed for poultry, the pilot program in the pork plants allows for faster line speeds and reduces the number of inspectors on the line. For high-speed swine kill lines, there are four inspectors in a HIMP plant, compared to seven in a traditional plant. Three of those inspectors are stationed at the head, viscera and rail, respectively, and one inspector is offline, according to a USDA spokeswoman. Line speeds at the HIMP pork plants (which USDA declined to identify) average 100- to 200-head-per-hour faster, with the highest speed so far at 1,210 head per hour.

Oversight
Derfler also defended USDA’s perceived lack of oversight of the HIMP pork pilot program, which has never been formally evaluated.

The OIG report in May stated:
In 1997, FSIS began a pilot program called the HACCP-based Inspection Models Project (HIMP) for swine, which allowed five large plants to have faster line speeds with fewer FSIS on-line inspectors. Although program goals were to increase food safety and plant efficiency, FSIS could not determine whether these goals were met because it did not adequately oversee the program. Specifically, FSIS (1) did not evaluate whether the program resulted in a measurable improvement to the inspection process, (2) allowed one HIMP plant to forgo the standard FSIS policy to manually inspect viscera, and (3) did not have formal agreements with the HIMP plants. This occurred because FSIS’ focus was on other issues, and it did not consider the swine HIMP program a priority. Since FSIS did not provide adequate oversight, HIMP plants may have a higher potential for food safety risks. Nationwide, 3 of the 10 plants cited with the most NRs continue to participate in the HIMP program.

In response to the OIG report, USDA has committed to evaluating the program by March 2014. Meanwhile, Derfler said there is no reason for concern.

“What we know is that the plants are operating okay. There is no basis for any concern, so therefore we have allowed the system to go as we focused on poultry,” he said. “We have inspection personnel there every day doing carcass-by-carcass inspections. And they are able to find on a carcass-by-carcass basis [that] the carcasses are not adulterated and they are able to put the mark of inspection on it. We have confidence in our inspection personnel. We have confidence in the jobs they are doing.”

Earlier this month the Government Accounting Office (GAO) issued a review of the HIMP programs in poultry and pork plants. Relative to pork, the report concluded USDA would need to collect and analyze more data to determine if the pilot project is meeting its purpose of deploying inspection resources more efficiently and in accordance with food safety requirements before considering if it makes sense for implementation across the 608 U.S. hog slaughter plants.

Derfler noted, however, that because the inspection protocols are different in HIMP plants than in traditional plants, it’s difficult to get comparable data.

“In a traditional plant, [government inspectors] are sorting for all types of product defects — food safety as well as non-food safety. We have structured it in HIMP so that their focus is on food safety: toxemia, septicemia, fecal material,” he said, explaining that plant employees are sorting product for other types of defects before they are observed by government inspectors. “If any of these types of [food safety] defects manage to slip through the plant’s initial sorting, then it is obviously and readily determinable by our inspection personnel. They are focused on this and so therefore it is not surprising they are finding it,” he added.

Not saying
Despite piloting the concept for 15 years, USDA officials hesitate to even acknowledge they are considering a HIMP-type inspection model for pork.

In May, Under Secretary for Food Safety Elisabeth Hagen said that USDA was not considering HIMP-type inspection for either pork or beef, in an interview with Food Chemical News.

“All I can tell you is that obviously we are doing the review of the data,” said Derfler. “We committed to that, and the OIG and GAO is aware of it. We are going to do our review and then we are going to make our decision at the time. I can’t indicate one way or the other.”

Asked why else there would there be a 15-year pilot unless USDA was contemplating the program for U.S. pork plants, Derfler said, “You can draw your own conclusion.”

Equivalency
The Washington Post article also called into question whether or not USDA had used the protocols in its HIMP pilot programs as a model for approving equivalency of food safety inspection programs in Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

“That’s not true,” said Derfler. “We do it on the basis of our system compared to their system — not our HIMP system, our system as a whole. And it is an equivalence decision. It doesn’t have to be exactly the same.”

He acknowledged USDA has approved Canada’s HIMP-type system for beef inspection, but said that proves his point. “If if it was the case that it was only HIMP to HIMP, we would never be able to do that, but that’s not the case... We are doing it on a system-to-system basis.”

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