![\"\"](\"https:\/\/savvyconsumer.files.wordpress.com\/2012\/03\/sallygsig.jpg\" "\\"sallygsig\\"")
<\/a>By Sally Greenberg, NCL Executive Director<\/strong><\/div>\n<\/p>\n
According to the\u00a0Post\u00a0<\/em>story, the plan \u201chas a history of producing contaminated meat at American and foreign plants.\u201d\u00a0 The\u00a0Post<\/em>\u00a0noted that the USDA’s decision to allow federal inspectors to be replaced at plants by private employees that serve as inspectors had produced \u201cserious lapses that included failing to remove fecal matter from meat\u201d in three of the five plants that had participated in a pilot program for more than a decade.<\/p>\n The\u00a0Post<\/em>\u00a0went on to note that plants using the same procedure in Australia and Canada also ran into problems. In one case, a Canadian company had to recall 8.8 million pounds of beef products for E. coli contamination. A Government Accountability Office (GAO) report last month even said that it would be difficult to recommend rolling out the plan nationwide.<\/p>\n NCL has been working with a coalition of food safety and worker safety groups since the moment the USDA announced its disastrous campaign to shift oversight to private companies, to increase line speeds, and endanger both workers and consumers. But the USDA simply won\u2019t listen. The tide should be turning though. We have a new bill this week from Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) called the\u00a0Safe Meat and Poultry Act,<\/a>\u00a0which addresses concerns about the line speeds and potential for food safety outbreaks in the USDA plan, the GAO report, and now this\u00a0Washington Post<\/em>\u00a0story. We urge the USDA to listen at last to critics and give up this program, for the sake of the health and safety of all Americans.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Sally Greenberg, NCL Executive Director This week\u2019s Washington Post ran an expose story \u2013 one we were glad to see \u2013 about the misguided Department of Agriculture (USDA) plan […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"_price":"","_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_header":"","_tribe_default_ticket_provider":"","_tribe_ticket_capacity":"0","_ticket_start_date":"","_ticket_end_date":"","_tribe_ticket_show_description":"","_tribe_ticket_show_not_going":false,"_tribe_ticket_use_global_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_global_stock_level":"","_global_stock_mode":"","_global_stock_cap":"","_tribe_rsvp_for_event":"","_tribe_ticket_going_count":"","_tribe_ticket_not_going_count":"","_tribe_tickets_list":"[]","_tribe_ticket_has_attendee_info_fields":false},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2467"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2467"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2467\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10455,"href":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2467\/revisions\/10455"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}