020349 Dems Push for Food Recall Reforms

Washington - Senate Democrats pressed the Bush administration to seek the legal authority to require food companies to recall tainted products, a power the industry doesn't want the government to have.

"I want the administration to ask for these tools," Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., told Agriculture Department officials.

The Clinton administration asked Congress for mandatory recall authority but couldn't get lawmakers to grant it because of opposition from the food industry. Last fall's anthrax attacks raised new concerns in Congress about whether the government had the power it needed to protect the food supply

Elsa Murano, the Agriculture Department's undersecretary for food safety, said food companies are good about recalling contaminated products without being forced to do so.

There has only been one case where a company initially refused to issue a recall, and the firm eventually did so anyway after USDA moved to seize the food, she said.

"So far, our history has been that our voluntary recall system works," she said.

But Murano said that "there wouldn't be any downside" to the government having the authority to require recalls.

"We only need one (case of contaminated product) to produce a catastrophe," said Sen. Herb Kohl, D-Wis., chairman of the Senate agricultural appropriations subcommittee.

A 2000 report by the General Accounting Office cited two cases where the Agriculture Department was slow or indecisive in pushing a company to issue a recall: The 1997 outbreak of E. coli poisonings linked to a Hudson Foods plant in Nebraska, and a 1998 listeria outbreak traced to a Bil Mar Foods plant in Michigan.

Last year, the department recorded 86 recalls of meat and poultry products around the country and about 30 percent of those were initiated by the company, Murano said.

Recalls for other products are handled through the Food and Drug Administration.

On another matter, Murano told the subcommittee that USDA is inspecting all Mexican meat that enters the country because of safety concerns about the plants where it is processed. The border inspections were started after visits to the plants last fall by Agriculture Department inspectors.

Inspectors will return to the plants in April, she said. Because of the problems they have been finding, the department is considering leaving inspectors in Mexico for up to a year at a time.

The United States buys a very small amount of meat from Mexico, about 0.4 percent of total meat and poultry imports, or $12 million a year.

One plant has been barred from shipping meat to the United States since May 1999, she said.

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