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http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/09/09/usda-privatizing-meat-inspections-with-pr
ogram-that-allowed-chunks-of-feces/

The Department of Agriculture (USDA) is planning to roll out a meat
inspection program nationwide that will allow pork plants to use their own
inspectors, but it has a history of producing contaminated meat at American
and foreign plants.

The Washington Post reported on Monday that documents and interviews showed
that a plan to allow hog plants to replace federal USDA inspectors with
their own private employees had produced "serious lapses that included
failing to remove fecal matter from meat" in three of the five plants that
had participated in a pilot program for more than a decade.

And plants using the same procedure in Australia and Canada also ran into
problems. In one case, a Canadian company had to recall 8.8 million pounds
of beef products for E. coli contamination.


Most recently, New Zealand had been given permission to export meat to the
United States from plants using the inspection procedure. But government
inspectors in New Zealand have already warned that the meat produced at
those plants is contaminated at times.

"Tremendous amounts of fecal matter remain on the carcasses," Ian Baldick,
an inspectors union representative, told the Post. "Not small bits, but
chunks."

In 1997, the USDA allowed five pork plants to participate in the Hazard
Analysis and Critical Control Point-based Inspection Models Project (HIMP),
which industry lobbyists claimed would accelerate processing times while
cutting down on the number of government meat inspectors. After 15 years, a
USDA inspector general report found last spring that three of the five
plants in the program were some of the worst in the country.

A separate Government Accountability Office (GAO) report last month said
that it would be difficult to recommend rolling out the plan nationwide.

The USDA is moving forward with rolling out the new meat inspection
procedures after the evaluation is complete in the spring of 2014. A similar
plan for chicken and turkey plants is expected to be finalized later this
year.


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