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| The upside down world of food safety |
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| In the upside down world of the USDA’s current leaders, sound science is what they say it is and food safety seems to be what is best for agribusiness. Every other differing idea or person has a nearly perfect chance of being ignored, talked to death or litigated to death.
Take the case of Creekstone Farms, the small, Kansas-based premium beef slaughterer and seller.
Four months after America’s first BSE-positive, or Mad Cow was discovered in Dec. 2003, USDA denied Creekstone’s request to voluntarily test its slaughter cattle for BSE.
The private testing, argued Creekstone, was a reasonable, market-based approach to ease customer concerns especially its highly valued Japanese customers – over the safety of U.S. beef.
Not so, said USDA and its big packer backers. USDA had the law on its side, a 1913 one it dusted off and bent to its purpose. The “Big Four” packers had their size: they kill 88 out of every 100 cattle in America and they didn’t want the added expense of testing a single one of the – especially since the taxpayers would fund USDA’s “science-based” testing.
For nearly two years thereafter, Creekstone negotiated with USDA to chart a government-approved path through the bureaucratic thicket. All came to naught.
Finally, in March 2006, the tiny packer filed suit in federal court to get access to the BSE test kits USDA claimed it solely controlled.
On March 29, 2007, the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. handed Creekstone the test kits, noting the agency’s concerns over what the results of the private tests might imply to customers were not within USDA’s “statutory responsibilities.” (The court also gave USDA until June 1 to appeal the decision.)
The key is the court’s view that USDA has no legal aut |
| 4/18/2007 |
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