Food Industry's Own Lobbying Now Costing it a Bundle

The U.S. government could now be requiring food companies to keep extensive records of shipments so that when an outbreak foodborne illness occurs, its source could be easily found. But the industry successfully lobbied the Bush Administration to limit the amount of paperwork it had to keep, saying it would be too costly.

Now that lobbying is biting back, hard. The Associated Press on Friday issued a damning investigative report showing that, thanks to the industry’s own efforts, the recent salmonella outbreak has cost it about $250 million and counting. Investigators from within the industry and within the government are still trying to find the source of the salmonella. First they said it was tomatoes. Then they said it was jalapeño peppers. Now people are scared to buy either.

The AP’s Larry Margasak writes:

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.

“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,” William Hubbard, a former FDA associate commissioner, told Margasak.

The article goes on to detail the maneuvering that went on in Washington – including in the White House — to derail the proposed regulations, and Margasak names names:

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.

Would these regulations have enabled investigators to have quickly found the source of the recent salmonella outbreak? It’s impossible to say, though it seems likely that it would at least have sped up the process. And as one source told Margasak, “It wouldn’t have hurt.”

That source was none other than Robert Brackett, senior vice president of the Grocery Manufacturers’ Association – the same group that spent $2.6 million on lobbying during the time the rules were under debate, and which complained that they would be too onerous for the industry to endure.