WASHINGTON — A Tyson Foods Inc. plant in Waldron shut down last week by the
U.S. Department of Agriculture remained open in 1996 despite a nation’s-worst 1,753
critical violations, department records show.
The poultry plant had 4,100 violations in 1997, but not all were critical, department
officials said. By comparison, the Hudson Foods ground beef plant in Nebraska that made headlines last August for its 25 million-pound recall and for being shut down by an Agriculture Department ”swat team” of inspectors had only 90 critical violations during 1996. The Agriculture Department permitted hundreds of meat and poultry plants to operate virtually uninterrupted, even while federal inspectors filed tens of thousands of citations against them for unsanitary conditions and food contamination, department records show.
Cox Newspapers analyzed an Agriculture Department computerized database of
meat and poultry inspection records for 1996 and found 138,593 instances of inspectors saying food prepared in packing plants was ”certain” to sicken consumers.
The database was obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.
Some days, the database showed, Tyson’s Waldron plant averaged one critical
violation every two hours.
A ”critical” violation is defined by the Agriculture Department as a plant condition
”certain” to contaminate food, ”certain” to reach consumers and ”certain to have a
detrimental effect upon the consumer.”
Yet the plant never missed a day of production in 1996 because of federal sanctions.
It was difficult to get Tyson’s response to the findings late last week because its
chief spokesman, Archie Schaffer III, a company vice president, said he was
”distracted” by his indictment Thursday by the special prosecutor investigating illegal corporate gifts from Tyson to former Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy. The company has pleaded guilty to some charges.
He released a statement Friday blaming the high number of violations at the
Waldron plant on the ”subjectivity” of the federal inspectors.
Experts can’t estimate how much contaminated meat and poultry make it to
America’s dinner tables. Officials at the federal Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention have long argued that food-borne illness is a far bigger problem than
public reports suggest and that processing plants play a major role.
The extent of the situation detailed in the Agriculture Department database
surprised a CDC doctor.
”Heavens,” said Paul Mead, a CDC epidemiologist, when told that some plants have
been allowed to operate after being cited 1,000 or more times for the most serious of unsanitary conditions.
”The burning question is why is a plant with that many violations … why has the
federal] inspector not been pulled from that plant?” he asked. ”And I have no idea.”
Thomas J. Billy, head of the Agriculture Department’s Food Safety Inspection
Service, said the high number of violations shows that his inspectors did their job in
catching contaminated food before it left the plant. He dismissed as ”speculation” the idea that frequent violators might be shipping contaminated food that inspectors
missed.
While most of the nation’s approximately 6,000 processing plants had only a few
violations, 299 were cited weekly. Agriculture Department officials can close or curtail operations at plant, but they rarely do so, even in the most extraordinary
circumstances.
While the computer database notes categories of violations, it does not include
inspectors’ specific descriptions of the unsanitary conditions reported.
A Cox reporter who visited the Waldron plant recently was refused access to the
inspection reports kept in an Agriculture Department office at the plant.
”That [examining the reports] is not something that we are going to allow you to do,”
Schaffer told the reporter.
Although the documents are public record, both Schaffer and the government
inspector in charge at the plant said journalists could see the records only after filing a Freedom of Information Act request in Washington. Such requests often take months to process.
Wednesday, six days after the reporter visited the plant, Agriculture Department
officials finally closed it for repeated sanitation infractions. A department spokesman said they had amassed 4,100 violations in 1997. It could not be determined how many of those were critical.
Still, the Waldron plant’s track record on critical violations was not unique.
While 299 plants had 100 or more critical violations, seven topped 1,000 or more in
996, the last year for which records are complete. But the Agriculture Department told Congress that it shut down only six plants in 1996.
Department spokesman Jacque Knight would not disclose the names of the plants
and in December referred a request for those details to the Freedom of Information Act office. A month later, that office has yet to supply the plant names.
The Clinton administration said late last month that it was planning to ask Congress
for significantly more money in the next federal budget to, among other things,
increase the number of food inspectors.
The administration says it is responding to public alarm over the safety of the
nation’s food supply. The CDC estimates that contaminated foods make more than 30
million Americans sick every year and cause over 9,000 deaths.
Agriculture Department records show that Clinton’s concerns hit close to home.
Arkansas led the nation with 15,269 critical violations in 1996 even though far fewer processing plants exist there than in states like California and New York.
Billy, the inspection chief, also said the inspection records dramatize the need for a
new inspection program coming into place Jan. 26. The old method of assigning
inspectors to catch problems is being replaced with a program under which companies will monitor their own operations and inspectors will double-check the work.
Under the system being phased out, government inspectors look at meat and
poultry as it is being processed and write up citations known as Process Deficiency
Reports when meat and poultry packing laws are violated. Plant managers must respond by appealing or explaining the steps being taken to ensure problems will be corrected.
Under the new program, the reports will be eliminated and plants have been asked to
identify points in their production where contamination is most likely, then design
programs to control it. Plants also must test for bacteria and halt production if bacterial levels exceed specified limits.
A year in the phase-in process, the new Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points
(HACCP) system is touted by Agriculture Department officials as science-based with
objective standards. Skeptical meat inspectors, however, privately joke that HACCP
actually stands for ”Have A Cup of Coffee and Pray.”
At a pork plant operated by IBP Inc. in Columbus Junction, Iowa, it has failed to halt
contamination of hams, records show.
”The packers are going to have it made,” said Charlie Limoges, a veteran Iowa
inspector. ”The only thing they had going against them was the [deficiency reports],
the stuff I documented. Now there won’t be the documentation.”
This article was published on Sunday, January 18, 1998.
