Page images
PDF
EPUB

Mr. POAGE. You also bring in some sausage, do you not, or do you bring in any sausage as sausage or just sausage meat processed after it gets here?

Dr. CLARKSON. Very small quantities of it. From Canada we may very well get some at the border areas. From time to time there will be some specialty canned sausages, but very little.

Mr. POAGE. So you have the same difficulty in inspecting that, that you have with canned meat, do you not?

Dr. CLARKSON. The same thing; yes, sir.

Mr. POAGE. I have observed in federally inspected plants that the first thing which is done is to inspect the organs of the animals to determine about disease.

Of course, there is no way in the world or anything that you can do about that on the imported meats, except to the extent you know the efficiency of the inspection service in the country from which the meat comes. Is that right?

Dr. CLARKSON. Correct, sir.

Mr. POAGE. You rely entirely upon New Zealand or Mexican inspectors for those inspections?

Dr. CLARKSON. Yes, sir.

Mr. POAGE. To determine the existence of disease?

Dr. CLARKSON. Yes, sir.

Mr. POAGE. Just what inspection do you make? Do you actually keep people down there all of the time, say in Mexico? Do you keep inspectors in New Zealand and in Australia all of the time to check these plants? I do not mean that you inspect every animal. I know that is impossible. But do you inspect each plant in New Zealand, say once a week?

Dr. CLARKSON. No, sir; we do not.

Mr. POAGE. How often do you inspect each plant in New Zealand? Dr. CLARKSON. We rely on the services of the agricultural attaché and the embassy in the foreign country.

Mr. POAGE. Do you mean that the foreign plants are not inspected by your men but by an ambassador or attaché who is not versed in inspecting meats?

Dr. CLARKSON. That is right.

Mr. POAGE. I think that we have some very good agricultural attachés. However, I do not think that they are technical men. I do not think that they should be. I do not think that they are there for that purpose.

Do you send anybody who is an actual meat inspector to visit these foreign plants? How do you know that the New Zealand system keeps from getting tubercular cattle or other diseased cattle?

Dr. CLARKSON. As I say, on an evaluation of the competency of these people and the system that they have established. Also we have one very good source of information and that is competition. We get a constant stream of information from people who are interested in shipments from foreign countries, and we use all of the facilities available to us to follow up on the information of that kind.

Mr. POAGE. If the packers here find anything wrong with the system in New Zealand-and I do not want to belittle New Zealand; I might as well say Mexico or Canada or any place else-if they find anything wrong with the system in that country, they tell you about it?

Dr. CLARKSON. Yes, sir.

Mr. POAGE. How do you check up on it?

Dr. CLARKSON. Well, we check either with the people who are there at the embassy, or on occasion we send some of our own people.

Mr. POAGE. How many of your people do you keep in the foreign field? I know that in every plant in the domestic field you have people to inspect the plant, and in big plants you have more than one inspector. How many people do you keep in Mexico, for example? Dr. CLARKSON. Actually we do not have any of our professional staff assigned continually in any country.

Mr. POAGE. How many days did members of your professional staff spend in Mexico last year? Maybe you cannot give us those exact figures, but give us some idea of the number.

I am not trying to get the exact figure. Did they spend just a few days and a few men, or did you have 100 men down there?

Dr. CLARKSON. If my memory serves me right, it would have been just a few total days. I am sure it was not any more than that, and last year it might have been possible that we did not have anybody from our professional staff looking into this matter in Mexico. We have people in Mexico, as you know, for other purposes, but not for this.

Mr. POAGE. I understand that. I do not think that it does much good to have a man who is checking on airplanes to try to know whether Mexican packers are cutting up diseased cattle.

Dr. CLARKSON. The fine point of this, Mr. Chairman, is the evaluation and reliance on that system. Of course, we always point to our neighbors to the north for our best example of that. And as we go on, country by country, we have varying degrees of competence and experience.

Mr. POAGE. I am not charging that anybody's system of inspection is falling down. There is no reason to believe that they are falling down, but it seems to me that we might do well to know as much about imported meat as we know about meat slaughtered at home. We are finding no fault at all; and I am inclined to think that we should not.

But certainly, should we not have equal knowledge about the meat that is produced elsewhere? I do not know whether I buy meat from Australia or from California or from Texas or from Iowa. I cannot look at the meat and tell.

Can you tell where it comes from? I do not believe that these experts can tell that either.

Dr. CLARKSON. We do the same as we do here. We would have to assign men there to do the inspection.

Mr. POAGE. I know that you would. Might we not actually very properly make a charge to anybody who imports meat into the United States to pay for the inspection, because we charge the man at home. The cost of domestic inspection is part of his cost of meat. I do not mean that you charge XYZ Packing Co. for your services, but the people of the United States are paying for the inspection of every pound of American meat that is sold in interstate commerce. American taxpayers pay for the inspection of it, do they not? Dr. CLARKSON. That is correct.

The

Mr. POAGE. Why shouldn't the taxpayers of any other nation pay for a comparable inspection, if they want to use the American market? Dr. CLARKSON. That would be an approach. I do not know of any reason why it should not be done, except that it is not in the law so far. Mr. POAGE. I know it is not. That is our responsibility. We would just like to know what you think about that. Do you think that you presently have a good enough inspection system when we do not know of our own knowledge what comes in from foreign countries?

Dr. CLARKSON. Well, we do think that this system works out pretty well.

Mr. POAGE. It does not correspond to the detailed inspection you require at home. Is it adequate abroad? You have to inspect every cow that goes through the plant at home. You inspect every one of them and you do not accept the statement of an American State that it has made the inspection?

Dr. CLARKSON. That is right.

Mr. POAGE. And yet you accept the certificate of some foreign countries?

Dr. CLARKSON. It is done where we are recognizing inspection. Mr. POAGE. You hope that it is done. If you go down there but once a year or once a month, how do you know that it is done? You might just as well tell the packers out at St. Joe, "You just look at these animals; you know if there is a tubercular one there, you will recognize it and report it to us, and we will rely on you to report it."

Why could we not recognize their good faith as readily as we do recognize the good faith of inspection service in Australia?

Dr. CLARKSON. I would not recommend that, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. POAGE. I would not either. The result is that your inspector stands in St. Joe and inspects every animal which is slaughtered there. We do not do it in Canada, or in the Argentine or anywhere else. However, we do it here at home.

Dr. CLARKSON. I think the responsible actions of the sovereign gov ernment are worth something.

Mr. POAGE. Of what government?

Dr. CLARKSON. Of the sovereign government; that that is worth something. Their responsible undertakings are worth something, and we are relying on those.

Mr. POAGE. I am not trying to charge that anybody's system is not good. I have no reason to say that the system in any of these countries that I have mentioned is bad. So far as I know, they are perfectly all right.

Dr. CLARKSON. I appreciate that.

Mr. POAGE. But what I do not know is, if your inspection in the United States is necessary and proper, and I think it is, why should we not require as much from a foreign country?

Dr. CLARKSON. No, sir; that is not the way it works. I think that my answer awhile ago was that we do know what is going on. We know through different devices. In this country we are providing the inspection; in the other countries we are requiring that that foreign government provide the same kind of inspection, so the inspection is provided.

Mr. POAGE. I am going to ask you whether or not we should not have a whole lot more inspection in foreign countries so that you

might actually know what they are doing. You just told us that you relied on the agricultural attaché. Do we have a single agricultural attaché who is an experienced meat man?

Dr. CLARKSON. I do not think so.

Mr. POAGE. I do not think so, either. They simply do not know the quality of meat inspection that is going on and I do not think that they should know. I mean, I do not think that we should employ a man as the agricultural attaché to perform meat inspection.

Dr. CLARKSON. Mr. Chairman, it seems to me that the system has been working out qute well, because when we have had our staff people look into the way the system is operatng in countries that have been accepted on the basis of investigation and determination by representatives of our embassy, they have been working as we have been given to understand that they were working, so that I have a good deal of faith in that.

Mr. POAGE. What would it cost us to extend the inspection on the basis that you give it in the United States to all of the meat imported into the United States?

Dr. CLARKSON. You mean to establish ante mortem and post mortem inspection there?

Mr. POAGE. Yes.

Dr. CLARKSON. I do not know, but it would be considerable.

Mr. POAGE. What are we importing in percentage into the United States of foreign meat, about 3 percent?

Dr. CLARKSON. I understand last year it was somewhere around 7 or 8 percent, I beg your pardon, I was including the meat equivalent of livestock being imported.

Mr. POAGE. I just picked it out of the air. It is a relatively small percentage in total.

Dr. CLARKSON. The total of meat and meat equivalent of all livestock imported into this country runs around 7 or 8 percent.

Mr. POAGE. But the live animals involve no additional amount of inspection. What I am getting at is, the processed meat coming into the United States is a very small percent of the total sold in this country. How much do you spend all told on inspection?

Dr. CLARKSON. In this country?

Mr. POAGE. Yes, sir.

Dr. CLARKSON. Some $21 million.

Mr. POAGE. Well, suppose that it costs us twice as much outside the country as it does within-$2 million would do it.

Dr. CLARKSON. I imagine it would.

Mr. POAGE. That is all I want to develop.

Mr. HAGEN. With respect to this volume, back in 1958 it was 2 percent and I assume that it would be considerably larger now with a large recent increase in foreign carcasses-probably close to a billion pounds, would you not say?

Dr. CLARKSON. Dr. Miller says close to a billion pounds would be right. That would be just about 3 percent.

Mr. HAGEN. To pursue Mr. Poage's line of questioning further, do you require foreign meat inspection regulations to equal our Federal standards?

Dr. CLARKSON. Yes, sir; we do, that there are comparable statutes. That is one of the requirements.

Mr. HAGEN. Do you have the authority to blackball a given plant of a foreign country?

Dr. CLARKSON. The system that is set up covers only certain plants in each country. Oftentimes it is only a few; sometimes it is many, as in Canada. We do not blackball the individual plants, but in the handling of our reinspection at this end, if we get any knowledge of things not being right in any plant, we do two things: We take up the matter of recognition of the total inspection system with that country with a view to withdrawing it if it is not corrected, or full inspection of any products coming from that plant if the failure is of the kind that might be detected at that point.

Mr. HAGEN. However, you could not reject whole lots from a given plant, except on the basis of what your carcass inspection revealed even though you knew the plant of origin was unsanitary and the antemortem inspection was either nonexistent or poorly handled.

Dr. CLARKSON. The rejection of individual lots would have to be on the basis of findings there at the port.

Mr. HAGEN. Based upon that finding alone?

Dr. CLARKSON. Yes.

Mr. HAGEN. But you say that you could not inspect it until it was delivered, and you would blackball on that basis?

Dr. CLARKSON. No. That kind of decision would go back to the adequacy of the original inspection. Our authority is to withdraw the recognition from the total.

Mr. HAGEN. That is a very radical measure. It would involve a total embargo of shipments from that country and any policy decision would involve the State Department and perhaps the President.

Dr. CLARKSON. That is right.

Mr. HAGEN. So it is very unlikely that it would ever be applied. Dr. CLARKSON. We applied it last year.

Mr. HAGEN. What country was that?

Dr. CLARKSON. One of the countries of Latin America or in Central America-Honduras, I think. I want to be sure for the record here. Mr. DAGUE. What about proposed inspections in a country like Poland? You would have two kinds of inspections. Do you have any way of checking the quality?

Dr. CLARKSON. We do not even take up the matter unless it is one of the countries that the State Department will allow for such arrangements. And for quite some time we were not making such arrangements. We do now have a recognition of that system in Poland.

Mr. DAGUE. I have always been struck with that fact as to those countries.

Mr. POAGE. Behind the iron curtain, do we get actual inspection of the Polish plants?

Dr. CLARKSON. Dr. Miller may be able to give you some information. Dr. MILLER. Mr. Chairman, as you might well expect, when Poland applied for recognition, it raised a lot of questions. Primarily, we felt that the State Department would advise us whether we should even deal with them on this subject.

Then, also, whether they would be in a position to check on the adequacy of the inspection system, were we to recognize their meat inspection system.

« PreviousContinue »