New Salmonella Rules Could Kill Small Farms
Amidst the annual holiday boom in turkey sales, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) is proposing a new rule to reduce salmonella in poultry. That’s a laudable goal, but the actual regulation—as is often the case—is being shaped in a way that hurts small farmers and meat processors while helping large agricultural conglomerates.
This rule has been in the works for a while. In 2020, the USDA’s Food Inspection Safety Service (FSIS) started making moves to reduce salmonella illnesses by 25 percent—part of the federal government’s “2030 Healthy People” initiative. The government has been targeting salmonella in the country’s poultry supply for even longer than that, and those efforts have brought down its prevalence in chicken and turkey. Yet that has not translated into a reduction in salmonella-based illnesses among Americans.
Many reasons have been proposed for this discrepancy. One likely cause is the fact that there are more than 2,500 salmonella serotypes but only around 100 cause human illnesses—and of those, only a handful are considered high-virulence in terms of the threat they pose. Current federal policy focuses on testing for any variant of salmonella instead of concentrating on the most problematic strains.
Theoretically, the new proposal will create a more nuanced and targeted system that focuses on just six serotypes in raw poultry that cause the most illnesses. (The agency finalized a similar rule on salmonella in breaded chicken products earlier this year.) But while the intent to exchange the regulatory axe for a scalpel is commendable, the actual impact will disproportionately hurt small farmers and meat processors—and still might miss the most important way to keep consumers from coming down with these diseases.
The proposed rule is based on numerous “components” that the USDA concludes will help with controlling salmonella in poultry. The agency proposes that if various raw poultry products contain “any detectable level of at least one of the [six high-virulence] Salmonella serotypes of public health significance,” the product will be considered “adulterated” and barred from being sold. The rule also would require chicken processing establishments to “incorporate statistical process control monitoring principles into microbial monitoring programs.”
If “statistical process control monitoring” sounds more like something you might see inside an Amazon warehouse than on a farm, welcome to 21st century American agriculture. In its benevolence, the USDA offers small meat processors “access to laboratory services” provided by FSIS, as well as a 3-year grace period to implement the changes (instead of the 1-year period for large establishments). But the compliance costs and headaches for small processors and farmers run much deeper than these modest accommodations.
Small processors and farmers are symbiotic partners in the larger ecosystem of the poultry industry, which is notorious for its vertical integration and the dominance of a few megacorporations, such as Tyson and Perdue. Unsurprisingly, “Big Chicken” companies like Tyson and Perdue support USDA’s new rule, since they are able to afford the costs of partnering with sophisticated compliance companies that specialize in “Poultry Integrator Compliance-Readiness Programs” whose “lab robotics” and “artificial intelligence algorithms” will ensure adherence to the regulations.
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Article from Reason.com
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