The USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service regulates live animal identification. The agency released its final rule on animal traceability on December 20, 2012. Under the new regulation, if livestock is transported across state lines, it has to be identified and certified by veterinarian inspection.
In a statement, USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack said that the law will “target when and where animal diseases occur, and help us respond quickly.”
Waldrop said the Consumer Federation of America believes a safe meat industry should begin on the farm.
“We definitely support an on-farm approach to food safety,” Waldrop said. “There is no federal agency that has jurisdiction [over food safety] on the farm. FSIS’s jurisdiction starts at the slaughterhouse door. As a result, you can’t set requirements [on the farm]. You have to figure out ways to incentivize producers to make those changes.”
Horsemeat
But as seen in the EU this year, traceability of meat products is not only about foodborne illness. Widespread economic adulteration and fraud through misbranding have now been revealed as realistic concerns. The obvious question is can that type of scandal happen in the United States?
Former USDA chief veterinarian Dr. Bill James says our web of regulatory safeguards makes it unlikely.
“The multiple interlocking import controls FSIS has in place – including country equivalence, plant certification, product eligibility, foreign audits, import re-inspection, and species testing – make the chances of a European-style horse adulteration scandal here immeasurably small,” James said in an interview with Food Safety News. “Add to this fact that there has been no horse slaughter here in the U.S. for years. In my professional opinion FSIS has taken all reasonable precautions to prevent such an event.”
James said that DNA species testing by FSIS is conducted for up to six species, including beef, pork, lamb, poultry, deer, and equine. According to James, in 2011, the FSIS did 11,308 species tests on 2,272 samples, and had three failures. In 2012, FSIS conducted 2,772 on 555 samples tests and had zero failures. The department tested 80 samples for equine in 2011 and 2012, and none were positive.
There is no federal law on the sale or consumption of horsemeat, but starting in 2006 and ending in 2011, Congress annually prohibited the use of any user fees or federal funds to go toward antemortem (pre-slaughter) inspection, effectively ending all domestic horse slaughter operations.
In 2011, after a GAO report titled “Horse Welfare: Action needed to address unintended consequences from cessation of domestic slaughter,” Congress ended the ban on federal money being spent on horse inspection.
Since the ban was lifted, horse slaughterhouses have applied to FSIS for inspectors. Earlier this month, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack told the Associated Press that a slaughter facility in New Mexico would open unless Congress acted, stating that the USDA is “duty-bound to do what needs to be done to allow that plant to begin processing.”
Even with the possibility of horse slaughter resuming domestically, James is not concerned.
“That product is going to demand a higher price on export than they could get for labeling as something else,” James said. “There is not an economic incentive to do so.”
