Food industry bitten
by its lobbying success
By LARRY MARGASAK, Associated Press Writer
Fri Jul 25, 2008
Yahoo! News
The industry pressured the Bush administration years ago to
limit the paperwork companies would have to keep to help
The White House also killed a plan to require the industry
to maintain electronic tracking records that could be reviewed easily during a
crisis to search for an outbreak's source. Companies complained the proposals
were too burdensome and costly, and warned they could disrupt the availability
of consumers' favorite foods.
The apparent but unintended consequences of the lobbying
success: a paper record-keeping system that has slowed investigators, with
estimated business losses of $250 million. So far, nearly 1,300 people in 43
states, the
Investigators initially focused on tomatoes as a culprit.
Now they are turning attention to jalapeno peppers.
A former member of Bush's Cabinet and three former senior
officials in the Food and Drug Administration told the AP that government food
safety experts did not get the strong record-keeping and trace-back system
originally proposed under a bioterrorism law to cope with a major foodborne illness.
"In retrospect, yes, if they (the regulations) had been
broader and a bit more far-reaching, it could have helped with this," said
Robert Brackett, senior vice president of the Grocery Manufacturers
Association. "It wouldn't have hurt, for sure." Brackett formerly was
a top safety official at the FDA.
Under pressure in 2003 and 2004, the White House agreed to
dilute record-keeping proposals by FDA safety experts.
"If the FDA had been given the resources and authority
years ago that it asked for to solve these kinds of problems, I think we would
have solved this already," said William Hubbard, a former FDA associate
commissioner.
Tommy Thompson, who was health secretary during the
industry's lobbying campaign, acknowledged that a more robust food-tracking
system — opposed by business groups as too expensive — could have helped stem
the current illnesses and business losses.
"We went in with the larger package but knew we had to
compromise," Thompson told the AP. "I was satisfied with this being
the first step. It's always better to be a Monday morning quarterback. We could
have ended up with nothing. If we had more, would it help the situation now?
Yes."
According to government records reviewed by the AP, business
groups met at least 10 times with the White House between March 2003 and March
2004, as the FDA regulations were under debate. Food industry lobbyists
successfully blunted proposals using arguments familiar in other regulatory
debates: The government's plans would saddle business with unnecessary and
costly regulations.
"The FDA's strong proposed bioterrorism rules were
significantly watered down before they became final," said Caroline Smith DeWaal, food safety director at the Washington-based Center
for Science in the Public Interest. The private advocacy group obtained the
White House meeting records under the Freedom of Information Act and provided
them to the AP.
Participants in the meetings included companies and trade
groups up and down the food chain, including Altria Group Inc. and Kraft Foods
Inc., when Altria was Kraft's parent; The Kroger Co.; Safeway Inc.; ConAgra
Foods Inc.; The Procter & Gamble Co.; the American Forest and Paper
Association; the Polystyrene Packaging Council; the Glass Packaging Institute;
the Cocoa Merchants' Association of America; the World Shipping Council; and
the Food Marketing Institute.
The Grocery Manufacturers Association spent $2.6 million on
lobbing in 2003 and 2004, the period when the FDA rules were under consideration,
according to federal lobbying records. The Food Marketing Institute spent $1.7
million during the period. The figures were for all lobbying by the trade
groups and on their behalf.
The grocery group complained during the comment period that
the FDA was overstepping authority that Congress had granted under the new
bioterrorism law. It said the FDA wanted a "cradle-to-grave record-keeping
system" to track every morsel of food delivered to every retail grocery
shelf and said more tracking information does not always produce a better
result.
The marketing institute said a proposed tracking system as
envisioned by the FDA "would be exorbitantly costly."
The food industry now says it will agree to a better tracing
system operated by the government, as long as the industry can advise how to
design it.
"We support the government requiring industry to have
traceability systems that are effective and work," said Jill
Hollingsworth, group vice president for food safety programs at the marketing
institute. "But industry has to come up with a system that follows
products throughout the food chain."
The FDA official in charge of the current salmonella
investigation, David Acheson, said the agency slowly is reviewing paper records
to help trace tainted produce. But Acheson disputed arguments that an
electronic records system would necessarily have helped investigators.
"We still haven't managed to figure out this
outbreak," he said in an interview days before the case's biggest break —
discovery of a tainted Mexican-grown jalapeno in a southern
The White House Office of Management and Budget defended its
meetings with food industry groups in 2003 and 2004, saying it regularly meets
with companies and individuals with a stake in proposed government rules.
"Our door is open for anyone — from non-profits,
industry representatives to individual citizens — who request meetings on
regulations," OMB spokeswoman Jane Lee said. "These are listening
sessions in conjunction with personnel from the regulating agency."
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