JUST as we have been warned, now this report on the dangers privatizing food inspection poses to the American public. Privatizing food safety inspection is like putting a fox in the chicken house. See my earlier post DO YOU WANT SHIT WITH YOUR CHICKEN (OR TURKEY)? 5APR12
http://bucknacktssordidtawdryblog.blogspot.com/2012/04/do-you-want-shit-with-your-chicken-or.html
This from Salon....
(Credit: (Wikimedia))
According to an
investigation
from Bloomberg Markets magazine released Thursday, the growing
privatization of food inspection has led to severe failures in oversight
and has caused millions of Americans to fall sick.
Bloomberg Markets reports:
During
the past two decades, the food industry has taken over much of the
FDA’s role in ensuring that what Americans eat is safe. The agency can’t
come close to vetting its jurisdiction of $1.2 trillion in annual food
sales. In 2011, the FDA inspected 6 percent of domestic food producers
and just 0.4 percent of importers.
The FDA has had no rules for how often food producers must be
inspected. The food industry hires for-profit inspection
companies—known as third- party auditors—who aren’t required by law to
meet any federal standards and have no government supervision. Some of
these monitors choose to follow guidelines from trade groups that include ConAgra Foods Inc., Kraft Foods Inc. and Wal-Mart. The private
inspectors that companies select often check only those areas their
clients ask them to review. That means they can miss deadly pathogens
lurking in places they never examined.
For the
investigation, the magazine obtained reports from for-hire auditors
which gave “sterling marks” to growers and food producers found to be
responsible for “tainted food that sickened 2,936 people and killed 43
in 50 states… A Colorado melon farm was audited by a for-profit
inspection company in 2011 with top safety ratings, just before its
fruit was causing the deadliest outbreak of foodborne disease in the
U.S. in nearly 100 years.”
The report also found that it was not
uncommon for the for-profit auditors to have financial ties to the
companies whose produce they inspected. For example, A Kansas-based
auditor, AIB International Inc., awarded top marks to producers that
sold toxic food and had board members working as top managers at client
companies.
For-profit auditors, Bloomberg points out, have failed
to test for bacteria in five food-caused outbreaks in the past six
years. In light of this, the FDA has attempted to regain control of
inspections, but has faced road blocks set up by food industry
lobbyists:
The
FDA is trying, so far without success, to wrest back control of food
inspection from the industry. In 2008, the agency estimated that it
would need another $3 billion—quadrupling its $1 billion annual budget
for food safety—to conduct inspections on imported and domestic food,
the FDA’s former food safety chief David Acheson says. Instead, the food
industry lobbied for, and won, enactment of a law in December 2010 that
expanded the role of auditors—and foreign governments—in vetting
producers and distributors of food bound for the U.S.
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