When a former NFL player known for his dirty play was asked if he ever “threw” a game – purposely helped the opposing team win – the player replied by stating the obvious.<br>
“It’s impossible for a player to throw a game,” he explained. “There’s only one person who can do that and he wears stripes and carries a whistle.”<br>
That insight seems to be confirmed everyday on the rough-and-tumble playing fields of business: If you want a winning edge, get the referees—lawmakers and those you enforce the law – on your side.<br>
That’s clearly been the case with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s daisy chain of food inspection. The latest instance of oversight failure, complete with stomach-churning video courtesy of an un-striped whistleblower, the Humane Society of the United States, resulted in the “voluntary” recall of 143 million pounds of ground beef. How does America’s red meat inspector not see a 143 million pound train—enough hamburger for 2.2 million Americans to meet USDA’s per person beef consumption for a year – coming down the tracks?<br>
They do it the old-fashioned way; they either don’t look or they look the other way, reported the Wall Street Journal on March 3. Indeed, according to the Journal, “In reports dating back to 2003, the USDA Office of Inspector General and the Government Accountability Office cited the USDA’s lunch-program administrators and inspectors for weak food-safety standards, poor safeguards against bacterial contamination, and choosing lunch-program vendors with known food-safety violations.”<br>
Meat samples from one of those vendors, unnamed in the report, “tested during the 2003-04 school year contained both E. coli and salmonella.” That vendor “was cited 40 times for USDA violations that year.” Despite that pathetic pathogen record, “USDA awarded school-lunch contracts” to the grinder.<br>
With that record as a backdrop, our hired hands at USDA must have had their fingers crossed when they described the California downer-cow recall as an “isolated incident.” Six similarly large recalls – involving both USDA and the Food and Drug Administration over pot pies, spinach, peanut butter, lettuce, tomatoes and ground beef – in the last 19 months might be described many ways, but isolated isn’t one of ‘em.
The only government entity with a softer regulatory bite than USDA is the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), which has rubber-stamped virtually every food maker and meatpacking merger and buyout since the Reagan Administration.<br>
This unhindered and unquestioned concentration of power has emboldened industry to essentially dictate food safety policy and, equally important, shepherd former industry and trade group officials through USDA’s revolving door into food safety oversight roles. The latest rerun of this soap opera appeared March 4 when Brazilian meatpacking giant JBS SA announced it intends to buy America’s fourth largest beef killer, National Beef of Kansas City, Mo., as well as Smithfield’s beef slaughter operations, the fifth largest in the U.S., to add to its 2007 purchase of Swift & Co., number three in beef biz.<br>
If Justice approves the doubleheader deal, JBS would leapfrog both Tyson and Cargill to become America’s largest beef packer. Think about the market implications of the deal, urged Randy Stevenson, a Wyoming rancher and writer, in a widely disseminated March 10 email.<br>
“The day before (Justice approves the merger),” wrote Stevenson, the “cattle buyers from Swift, National and Smithfield” could not share cattle-buying plans without “violating the antitrust laws … (because) colluding would be devastating to the cattle market.”
The day after DOJ kisses JBS’s plan, however, “The same three buyers could meet without breaking the law (even though) the consequences to the cattle market would be equally devastating.”
Nuts? No, legal. Just ask the folks in striped shirts carrying whistles.<br>

The views and opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and not necessarily those of Farm World. Readers with questions or comments for Alan Guebert may write to him in care of this publication.