Although about 17% of the U.S. food supply is imported and several recent cases of food contamination have originated abroad, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has quietly cut spending since 2009 on in-person inspections of foreign slaughterhouses and meat processing plants, relying instead on a risk-based system that features more self-reporting. USDA officials disdain the phrase “risk-based,” preferring to call it “system-based.”

“This is more of a document approach,” one former official told Food Safety News, explaining the new regime in terms that sound a lot like a risk-based system: “It doesn’t make sense to keep going back to the countries that don’t have problems.”

Between 2001 and 2008, inspectors from the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) audited an average of 26.4 countries per year. In the wake of a 15% cut to its foreign safety program budget, from 2009 to 2012 FSIS audited an average of only 9.8 countries per year, a drop of 62.8%.

The decline started in 2009, to 21 audits, accelerating to only 6 countries in 2010 and a mere 3 in 2011: Australia, New Zealand and Poland. Thus far in 2012, FSIS has completed 10 audits and will soon complete an 11th in Canada. FSIS has not announced if any additional audits are scheduled for 2012.

Not only is FSIS conducting fewer audits, it is taking a long time to publicize their results. As of Monday, October 29, the agency had not posted all of its 2010 audit reports, nor had it posted any data about its 2011 and 2012 audits, which it claimed were still under review. On October 31, FSIS posted a few draft audit reports and notes about pending reports.

Denying that budget cuts had anything to do with this apparent policy shift—which was never publicized—FSIS contends the new system is more sophisticated than what it now calls the old “cookie cutter” audits. “We get more information from countries on an ongoing basis,” said an FSIS official. “We’re going to do less [sic] in-country audits.”

Meanwhile food safety is a serious issue. One out of six Americans suffer from a food borne illness each year, with 128,000 cases leading to hospitalization and 3,000 resulting in death. The cost of treating food borne illnesses comes to $152 billion each year.

–Matt Bewig

USDA Quietly Eliminated 60 Percent of Foreign Meat Inspections (by Helena Bottemiller, Food Safety News)

U.S. Doing Far Fewer Safety Checks of Foreign Meat (by Susie Cagle, Grist)

Inspections of Foreign Meat Decline after Budget Cuts to Food Safety Programs (by Travis Waldron, Think Progress)