010844 USDA Finds Plenty of Beef for School

Washington - The government is finding plenty of affordable beef for school lunch programs this year, despite complaints by school officials and meat packers that bacteria standards imposed by the Clinton administration were too stringent.

Prices soared and the Agriculture Department's beef purchases slumped last summer after USDA imposed the restrictions in June 2000. At least two states cancelled their orders for the meat.

The rules require processors to periodically sample their meat for salmonella bacteria, a microbe that is commonly found in many kinds of meat. No meat that tests positive for the bacteria can be sold to schools.

So far this summer, USDA has purchased 35.8 million pounds of ground beef, up from 13.9 million pounds at the same time last year, and the average cost of the meat has dropped by as much as 30 cents a pound.

“We're essentially on target,” USDA spokesman Jerry Redding said Wednesday. A year ago, the department “would go out for bids, and nobody was showing up,” he said.

Under pressure from meatpackers and schools, USDA proposed this spring to drop the salmonella testing requirement, but the White House quickly quashed that plan after an outcry from consumer advocacy groups.

“The meat industry is very capable of meeting high performance standards,” said Caroline Smith DeWaal of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a public advocacy group. “This shows that the improved standards for the school lunch program are a huge success and are resulting in safer beef going into the school lunch program.”

USDA bought 123 million pounds of ground beef during the 2000-2001 school year at a cost of $1.48 per pound, up from $1.15 during 1999-2000. For this school year, the department is paying about $1.34 per pound. Beef prices overall have risen sharply over the past two years.

About 5 percent of the beef offered to USDA during the 2000-2001 school year tested positive for salmonella and was rejected.

Before last year, the government would buy meat from any plant that was federally inspected.

Officials in USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service, which handles food purchases for schools, wanted to replace the salmonella testing requirement with a set of processing standards that would require all beef carcasses to receive anti-bacterial treatments. That would do more to improve the overall safety of meat than salmonella sampling, the officials said.

The American School Food Service Association praised the proposal at the time and still believes the rules imposed last year need to be changed.

“We need to find a middle ground where we are doing effective testing, but we are looking at the processes that meat vendors use to elevate the overall quality” of meat, said Barry Sackin, the association's director of government affairs.

Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman has not ruled out changing the purchase requirements but won't do so without consulting consumer groups, said spokesman Kevin Herglotz.

“I don't see anything on the horizon on that anytime soon,” he said.

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