The USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) should carry on with its work to reduce pathogens in meat and poultry, but first, the agency needs to improve documentation, add some timelines to its tasks and check on the effectiveness of on-farm practices.
Those three new recommendations by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the auditing,…
Last Friday, the Government Accountability Project (GAP) released affidavits from four federal inspectors from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s high-speed inspection pilot program who have come forward with their concerns about the system. “Under the HIMP model, company inspectors take over the duties of USDA inspectors at the lymph node incision and head inspection stations,”…
Reading “The Chain: Farm, Factory and the Fate of Our Food,” a new book from journalist Ted Genoways, one begins to wonder who is treated better: the millions of hogs consumed in America each year, or the people who work on the farms and in the factories that breed and slaughter them. The easiest conclusion…
The Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Pont (HACCP) Inspection Models Project (HIMP) project in hog slaughter establishments will continue, announced the U.S. Department of Agriculture is its latest evaluation of the project. The report’s objective was to determine whether the HIMP inspection system is performing as well as the existing swine processing inspection system “in…
U.S. hog farmers exporting to Mexico are going to have more hoops to jump through. In reaction to a multistage outbreak of porcine epidemic diarrhea, or PED, among piglets in the U.S., Mexico has officially imposed a ban on further hog imports. This will mean more restrictions and more inspections of U.S. hogs entering Mexico;…
