Minnesota Farmers Union

(July 10, 2009) - The presence of salmonella in peanut butter this last winter prompted calls for a number of solutions to the inspection failure, including one for the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) to take over all food inspection and another for the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to adopt the USDA Food Inspection Service's Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) method of inspection.

As House Agriculture Committee Chair Collin Peterson said, "We have jurisdiction over meat and catfish. FDA has jurisdiction over everything else. We're not perfect, but our track record is a helluva lot better at USDA than it is at FDA."

After the Jack in the Box E. coli outbreak in 1993, the USDA decided to move to the HACCP system of inspection. Based on the idea that the plant operator knows the plant better than the USDA, the responsibility for designing an inspection system was turned over to each individual plant.

According to John Munsell, Manager, Foundation for Accountability in Regulatory Enforcement (FARE), when USDA "officials initially described HACCP to the industry in the mid-90's, the agency made the following enticing promises: