NEW MEAT REINSPECTION
                                              Release No. 0054.97

                                     Tom Amontree  (202) 720-4623
Jacque Knight (202) 720-9113                                     

NEW MEAT REINSPECTION AND VERIFICATION PROCEDURES INSTITUTED WITH CANADA

     WASHINGTON, Feb. 20, 1997--Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman said
today new USDA procedures that went into effect this week at the Canadian
border will strengthen food safety reinspection and verification of Canadian
red meat carcasses imported into the United States under the U.S.-Canada
Free Trade Agreement.

      "The new system being used by USDA's Food Safety and Inspection
Service increases our confidence in the safety of imported red meat
carcasses," said Glickman.

     Under previous reinspection procedures, processing plants selected the
carcasses to be located at the back of the truck for reinspection by a U.S.
import inspector.  To address concerns about this process, USDA and
Agriculture Canada established a task force in 1994 to develop and test
improved reinspection procedures.  Those improved procedures went into
effect on February 16.

     Under the new reinspection procedures, Canadian inspectors randomly
select carcasses for every shipment, have them loaded at the back of the
truck, then seal the truck.  At the U.S. port-of-entry, an FSIS import
inspector will reinspect the samples selected by Canadian inspectors on
shipments that are selected for reinspection through a statistically based
computer system.

     A separate verification procedure will be performed randomly by FSIS
inspectors at U.S. plants receiving the shipment.  The samples selected by
the Canadian inspector will be reinspected, along with random samples
selected by FSIS from the rest of the shipment.  The results from this
verification activity will ensure that the carcasses selected by Canadian
inspectors are representative of the entire shipment.

     Every shipment has a random chance of being reinspected.  If
verification procedures show the samples selected by the Canadian inspector
are not representative of the entire shipment, FSIS will take regulatory
action, which includes the possibility of refusing shipments from a Canadian
plant.

     FSIS will evaluate the effectiveness of the new procedures for
Canadian meat imports and issue reports at the end of three months and six
months, according to Administrator Thomas J. Billy.  

     USDA and Agriculture Canada, under the U.S.-Canada Free Trade
Agreement, have formed working groups that continually meet to correlate
reinspection of each others' products to ensure that procedures will be
handled in a similar manner.

                                #

NOTE: USDA news releases and media advisories are available on the Internet.
Access the USDA Home Page on the World Wide Web at http://www.usda.gov