American feed manufacturers, feed additive suppliers, grain processors, feed mills, as well as a whole variety of companies involved in animal feed production and distribution are becoming increasingly concerned about updates being made to safety regulations. Feed industry chiefs claim that they are not being given sufficient information about the changes, and fear that this may lead to non-compliance with resulting fines and even plant closure.
The regulation changes are part of the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) which is intended to prevent the spread of pathogens, toxins, and other forms of contamination, such as mycotoxins.
Reporting on the situation, the feed industry journal Agri-Pulse noted that, “Larger feed facilities, those with 500 workers are more, were due to face routine government inspections as soon as next month [Sept 2017] on their preventive controls. The Food and Drug Administration has decided to give the plants another year before starting those inspections, but the agency has so far taken no steps to weaken the requirements themselves, which some in the industry think are unnecessary and too burdensome.”
As Richard Sellers, senior vice president of public policy and education for the American Feed Industry Association said, “We still remain very concerned about the FDA’s lack of understanding on the miniscule benefit that this rule is expected to have on the feed industry.”
Other feed producers and feed additive suppliers are also concerned about a lack of clarity, with numerous feed manufacturers complaining that they are unsure if they are incompliance or not.
Dave Fairfield, senior vice president of feed services for the National Grain and Feed Association, explained how a lot of large feed companies already have safety plans and preventive controls in place and others are moving forward in developing theirs, but at this point they still don’t whether they will meet the FDA’s expectations. “We’ve got regulatory text, but the words can mean a lot of different things,” said Fairfield.
This is a point supported by Sellers, when he said, “Without official guidance, we are basically encouraging our members to move along with what we think is best when it comes to the hazard analysis and risk-based preventive controls portion of FSMA.”
What is known, is that the safety plans for ethanol plants include testing for mycotoxins, the results of which may lead to restrictions on where the distillers grains can be sold depending on levels of contamination found. For example, distillers grains with excessive levels of vomitoxin, or deoxynivalenol (DON), may be refused permission to be sold for swine feed.
This has led some academics to argue that the rule changes are not only unclear, but also unnecessary. One such academic, Richard A. Williams, PhD and Director of the Regulatory Studies Program at the Mercatus Center of George Mason University, concluded in testimony to the US Senate that, “[The FDA’s preliminary regulatory impact analysis (PRIA) appears to present evidence that the rule is not needed. It shows that costly recalls have created the right incentives in the animal feed industry to prevent further recalls.”
The testimony also stated that, “…though FDA’s own analysis [of both pet food and farm animal feed production processes] demonstrates that there is no microbial contamination problem with farm animal feed…the FDA, oddly, relied on experts’ opinions about how effective the rule would be at preventing contamination of livestock feed. Despite its failure to find any problems with farm animal feed, FDA imposed the regulation and all its costly recordkeeping and monitoring requirements on both pet food and farm animal feed, needlessly raising the cost of farm animal feed.”
In a recent posting on the FDA website, Jenny Murphy, a consumer safety officer at FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine, defended the changes to the law, saying, “We really feel that the preventive controls provisions are in the best interest of public health. The responsibility is on the firm to make sure it is addressing animal food safety. By keeping the compliance dates but not beginning routine regulatory inspections, we’re protecting food safety while giving feed facilities additional time to make sure the system is working correctly and to make adjustments if needed.”
You can learn more about Jenny Murphy and the implementation of FSMA in her interview on YouTube.
Worryingly though, Murphy confirmed that it was possible that animal feed manufacturers could be sanctioned, for example with fines or enforced product recalls, if they ship unsafe feed products.
Agri-Pulse, however, does note that, “Feed mills owned by vertically integrated livestock operations are exempt from the FSMA regulations because they are considered farms.” Adding that, “Even though FDA won’t start its routine inspection of feed facility preventive controls for another year, inspectors will be checking plants’ CGMPs [Current Good Management Practices] and will look over their preventive control plans to make sure they are adequate.”
For now, feed producers and feed additive suppliers still have a few weeks to make any final changes to their procedures before the law is fully enforced. This leaves the feed industry with a large amount of uncertainty, and several unanswered questions.
1.How exactly will FDA inspectors react to feed facilities that are deemed to be below standard?
2.How will feed producers manage any additional costs incurred from the added safety precautions and bureaucracy?
3.Will the policy changes have any impact on improving animal feed quality and safety?
How these questions will be answered remains to be seen.
The deadline for enforcement of the new legislation is Sept 18th 2017.
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