USDA resists deep changes to meat, poultry rules

By Missy Ryan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. safeguards on the meat and poultry industry do not need a major overhaul, the Agriculture Department said on Monday, despite a record meat recall this year and lawmakers' growing calls for deep changes to the nation's food safety system.

"We do not feel the system we have will be improved by developing a mega-agency. We feel that sometimes small is better, is quicker, swifter, more nimble," Richard Raymond, the Agriculture Department's undersecretary for food safety, said at the Reuters Food Summit in Chicago.

Putting end to the current decentralized approach to food safety -- in which USDA regulates meat, poultry and eggs and the Food and Drug Administration oversees everything else -- is one step that some in the U.S. Congress hope will fix the United States' image problem when it comes to food safety.

The FDA, in particular, has been battered in the last year and a half by the discovery of dangerous spinach, peanut butter, seafood and other products in the U.S. marketplace.

Within the food industry, USDA, with more stringent, frequent inspections, has generally been seen as better equipped to safeguard its smaller corner of the food supply.

Yet USDA's reputation may be tarnished along with that of the meat industry, which is struggling to rebound from a scandal surrounding a meat plant's torture of cattle and processing of unfit animals for human consumption.

The practices at the Hallmark/Westland Meat Packing Co, exposed earlier this year by the Humane Society of the United States, triggered the recall of almost 143 million pounds (65 million kg) of meat, mostly beef.

USDA has also seen a worrying uptick in foodborne illness such as E.coli 0157:H. USDA recalled food 21 times last year, up sharply from eight times in 2006, Raymond said.  Continued...