CFIA Fails On Organics

Photo via Wikipedia

 Life isn't perfect,we know that. If you want to buy organic vegetables, you can't always get everything you want locally. This is Canada, after all, and we do have these extended winters. So we have to accept that if we are going to have fresh veg in the winter we may have to import it. Unless you live on lower Vancouver Island or are a seasonal eater--then you can eat winter vegetables that take well to storage; squash, carrots, turnips and rutabagas,  and the like.
If you want to eat organic vegetables, you can find more and more of it in the stores. The remarkable rise in demand has led suppliers to begin operating more and more of those weird hybrids; industrial organic farms. And Canada doesn't grow near the volume of organic vegetables that we consume, so we do a lot of importing.
Certification of Canada's organic farms is handled by agencies vetted by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA). The CFIA is also responsible for the safety of food imported and exported from this country. In line with this responsibility, the CFIA has been monitoring pesticide residues on imported labeled-organic vegetables. According to a recent CBC article:

The Canadian government brought in the Organic Products Regulations in 2009 requiring organic food producers to have their products certified by an accredited third-party certification body.
The certifiers conduct annual farm and facility inspections meant to ensure the organic producers are following the rules.
Rola Yehia, acting national manager of the CFIA’s consumer protection division, said, “If there is non-permitted substances found in organic products, we would notify the CFIA-accredited certification body who would request the organic operator to take corrective action."
"So we have the system in place, and we have the confidence in our system, and we have the mechanism to address any non-compliances if they arise,” said Yehia, whose oversight includes the Canada Organic Office of the CFIA.
"We have a good relationship with the industry, so we work together to correct any gaps in the system," Yehia added.

Health Canada sets a maximum residue limit (MRL) for food products, representing the most that is expected to remain on food. One of the reasons for this is because the world isn't perfect. Organic farms are not isolated from industrial farms, so it is to be expected that occasionally there might be pesticide drift from an industrial farm to an organic one. And "We see pesticide residues throughout our environment. It's in our soil, they're in our water, drinking water now, and there's new reports coming out showing there's pesticides in fetal cord blood. So unfortunately, it's really hard to have a zero pesticide residue any longer," said Matthew Holmes, executive director of the Ottawa-based Canada Organic Trade Association.
But what the CBC found out was that, while the CFIA was conducting MRL tests on organic food over the past decade, there were some troubling numbers. As much as eight percent of organic produce tested by Canadian inspectors has so much pesticide residue that experts say there is a strong indication synthetic chemicals were deliberately used. That is, farms allegedly using organic techniques appear to have been spraying chemicals on their produce--so much so that unacceptable residue levels remain on the vegetables even after they arrive in your local supermarket.
This is happening in the US as well.But there is a difference between the two countires. The US government was approached by American organic producers with a request to beef up enforcement of the organic rules. From the CBC story:

Starting in 2013, the USDA required five per cent of organic operations to undergo routine pesticide residue testing.
The U.S. testing protocol is part of a beefed up enforcement plan that was implemented at the request of organic farmers, according to the USDA’s McEvoy.
“They were seeing violations that were occurring, and enforcement was not occurring. Civil penalties were not being used,” McEvoy said.
“But I think organic farmers in particular, when they see violations, they want everyone to be held to the same standard and they want the penalties to be significant so that people are playing by the same rules,” McEvoy said.
The USDA responded to the organic farmers’ concerns by assessing approximately $500,000 in fines involving dozens of operators in the last four years. It even sent cases to criminal court.
In April 2012, Harold Chase of Springfield, Ore., was sent to prison for more than two years after he pleaded guilty to wire fraud for selling in excess of four million pounds of corn falsely labelled as organically grown. Chase is one of three people the USDA helped put in jail in the last few years. “The penalties send the message that you can't get away with defrauding the organic consumer,” McEvoy said.

So the US actually put some operators in jail for fraud around the question of organic farming. What about here in Canada? After all, we have a government that keeps telling us that our food is safe--even though there's been BSE found in Alberta, Tyson Foods was just recently forced into the biggest meat recall  in Canadian history, and the US Dept. of Agriculture recently gave the Canadian food inspection regime a grade of just barely "adequate."
Well, to no one's surprise, CFIA has done nothing. There has not been a single case of criminal prosecution involving organic production by CFIA. They have, on occasion, pulled organic certification from companies not following the rules, but these companies are both allowed to go on producing (albeit without the organic certification), and have not faced any serious discipline for the fraud committed on the consumers of their products.
We are dealing with a government that simply does not believe that there should be any outside, impartial inspection of our food system, and that the companies responsible for processing our food should be allowed to police themselves. The fox guards the hen house, and when we notice that there are considerably fewer fowl than there were a while ago, we're told to "move along. Nothing to see here." And we are left unable to trust our food supply, unable to trust in the regulations, and most certainly unable to trust our government.

Canadian Food Inspection--Fail?

Via CBC.ca

Back in November 2013, Canada's Auditor General raised some concern about Canada's food inspection regime. We had just come through some of the largest meat recalls in Canadian history, and considering that the focus of the Canadian food system is not feeding Canadians, but on export markets, these concerns took on an international flavour. The AG's report said (according to CBC News):

The auditor general found, for instance, that the Canadian Food Inspection Agency did recall unsafe food products in a timely fashion, but the recall system fell apart once a major food recall was announced.
"While illnesses were contained in the recalls we examined, I am not confident that the system will always yield similar results," Ferguson said.
The CFIA did not adequately manage the food recall system between 2010 and 2012 said Ferguson, who found that the agency did not have the documentation necessary to determine whether recalled food products had been disposed of, nor did it have the information necessary to identify and correct the cause of the recall in a timely way.
While registered meat establishments are required to maintain product distribution records to quickly help locate products during a food safety investigation, the audit report found many examples of incomplete documentation.

Our largest export market is the United States, and the US Department of Agriculture, charged with overseeing food imports to the US, took notice of the problems developing in Canada. Today, the Globe and Mail is reporting:

A U.S. audit of Canada’s food-safety system calls on the federal regulator to strengthen oversight of sanitation and the humane handling of animals at meat-slaughtering plants.
The findings from the tour of seven food-processing facilities, two laboratories and five Canadian Food Inspection Agency offices in the fall of 2012 were kept confidential until recently.
The Canadian Food Inspection Agency received an “adequate” rating, the lowest of three scores that are meted out to countries deemed eligible to export food to the United States. The designation means Canada will be subject to more robust audits and its food exports will undergo more inspections at the U.S. border than those of countries whose food-safety systems were rated “average” or “well-performing.”
Canada’s food-safety system faced heightened scrutiny after 23 people died in an outbreak of listeriosis linked to a Maple Leaf Foods plant in Toronto in 2008, and E. coli contamination in 2012 at the former XL Foods facility near Brooks, Alta., led to the largest meat recall in Canadian history.

The full text of the US review can be found on the Department of Agriculture website (.pdf).
The Canadian government under Stephen Harper, has made some changes to food inspection practices--notably transferring responsibility for CFIA to the Health Minister from Agriculture, but there is no evidence that this has made the food system any safer.
This problem is, and will continue to be, a government that has no interest in regulating corporate behaviour. CFIA has seen its staff and budget cut and the responsibility for food safety inspections farmed out to the very corporations being inspected, with only minimal (at best) CFIA oversight. And until we restore regulatory oversight to a democratic government as opposed to the corporate-owned one we currently have, we can expect food safety to be barely adequate at best for the foreseeable future.

Reducing e. coli Contamination

There's a report at Science Daily that talks about research by a "Cand.agric. Sigrun J. Hauge defended her doctoral research on 2nd May 2012 at The Norwegian School of Veterinary Science (NVH) with a thesis entitled "Hygienic impact of measures related to unclean cattle and sheep at farm level and in the abattoir."" The article goes on to detail Sigrun's testing of  a "hot water pasteurization" process for destroying e. coli  on lamb carcases. It is an interesting read (a copy follows), but its predicated on treating animals as industrial inputs. Stop doing that and meeat will become more expensive, better, and better for us.

ScienceDaily (May 4, 2012) — Following the E. coli case in Norway in 2006, when 17 people fell ill and one child died after eating mutton sausages, the meat industry introduced a number of measures in order to reduce the risk of food poisoning from meat. Clean animals and good hygiene during slaughtering are essential preconditions for food safety.

Sigrun J. Hauge has studied the effect of the measures implemented on farms and in slaughterhouses. The aim of the project "Uncontaminated Carcasses" was to uncover data that would help to improve the hygienic quality of meat from cattle and sheep by means of cleaner animals and efficient ways of slaughtering high-risk animals.
E. coli is a commonly occurring bacterium in the digestive tract of humans, animals and birds. Just a few strains are pathogenic and can cause diarrhea and kidney failure, particularly in children. The bacteria die at temperatures over 60-70 °C and are therefore normally eliminated by boiling and roasting. Hauge has shown that a new, rapid enzymatic method for detecting E. coli is equally as reliable as the traditional method of growing bacteria culture. This new method is therefore suitable for monitoring E. coli in abattoirs.