A message from Stenzel

TK: This across the inbox this afternoon, United Fresh president Tom Stenzel previews not only next week's hearings but the continuing debate over government interaction with the trade:


A Message from President Tom Stenzel


Dear United Fresh Members,

Last week, Chairman of the Board Tom Lovelace wrote to tell you of our association’s commitment to driving change in the way government addresses foodborne disease outbreaks, and to seek compensation for those unfairly harmed by this investigation. There’s been so much going on in these areas, let me update you on our progress.

Consumer Warnings/Investigation
First, we’re continuing daily to push government authorities to narrow the current investigation and bring it to a close as quickly as possible. The finding of a sample of jalapeño peppers in a distribution facility in McAllen, TX with the identical DNA fingerprint as the outbreak is an important step toward closure. Yet, the government’s warning not to consume any peppers is destroying markets for hundreds of jalapeño growers and suppliers unrelated to the outbreak, and we’re urging government to lift this total supply chain warning.

Congressional Hearings
Next week three separate Congressional hearings are scheduled to look at this outbreak investigation, what went wrong, and what lessons we can learn for the future. Robert Guenther and Dr. Dave Gombas on our staff have worked hard to brief each committee’s staff in advance of each hearing, providing detailed background on where we see things went wrong and what needs to be done in the future. I’m pleased with the strong slate of industry experts called to testify, along with government officials, academics, consumer groups and others. I’ll be focusing on overall lessons learned in my testimony at two of the hearings, and others will focus on everything from damages to the tomato industry to the loss of consumer confidence in food safety and government.

Legislation to Compensate Tomato Industry
There’s good news here with the introduction of legislation by Rep. Tim Mahoney of Florida to provide up to $100 million in compensation to the tomato industry for losses incurred through the misidentification of tomatoes and blanket consumer warnings. Congressman Mahoney gets it, and we’re working with him and Congressional allies to build the case, despite what are frankly some pretty big odds. Even with an uphill fight, we need to drive home the message that government warnings have huge impact, with major financial consequences on those totally unassociated with the outbreak. There simply must be greater recognition of the damage these broad brush actions have. The entire tomato industry suffered here, and we’ve got to make sure that growers, shippers, repackers and fresh-cut tomato processors are fairly compensated. A number of us will advocate strongly in support of this effort in next week’s hearings.

FDA/CDC/HHS Actions
We’re also continuing direct dialogue with FDA about clearing all tomato production regions for the future, as well as broader questions of what went wrong in this investigation, and ways that the system must change in the future. You’ll remember that our association and PMA have asked the Secretary of Health and Human Services for a top-level meeting and ongoing dialogue about these issues, and government staff members are now working to set that up.

National News Media
Media coverage continues to be frustrating, but we’re breaking through here and there. From the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post to USA Today, CNN, ABC, etc., our communications VP Amy Philpott is getting our views in every story we possibly can. Our general assessment is that most media have realized that tomatoes are highly unlikely to have caused any illness whatsoever.

Media stories are now turning to follow-up coverage, focused a lot on what happens next. Many in the consumer advocacy community and Congress are using this outbreak as a means to drive food safety legislation, or prescriptive traceability schemes. Ironically, the major problem in this outbreak investigation was identifying the wrong cause and chasing ghosts far longer than needed. You know that United Fresh supports commodity-specific, risk based regulation that is fair and equitable across an entire commodity. And, we’re working hard to increase efficiencies across our supply chain in traceability. But neither of those topics has anything to do with the failures in this outbreak. Drawing those distinctions for the news media is a challenge, though.

Industry Traceability
Finally, let me add a word about industry traceability, a topic likely to dominate next week’s Congressional hearings. We believe the vast majority of produce companies and their supply chain partners are in compliance with the Bioterrorism Act and its “one-step-up; one-step back” requirements. Industry members take that responsibility seriously. While produce often changes hands between farm and table, industry members are able to track a majority of produce from retail back to farm source. While FDA continues to report major problems in doing tracebacks, others such as Minnesota health officials have said it takes “a few phone calls and you can work it fairly quickly back to the grower.” That is the experience that I hear as well from many of our members across the industry. We believe that when FDA tracks produce, it is more dependent upon a legal trail of paperwork, seeking to make sure that all the details correlate exactly on invoices, bills of lading, etc. This can lead to bogging down in understanding the different ways companies use to track produce within their own operations. It may be confusing to an outsider who is examining hundreds of pages of records in an unfamiliar business, but to most industry members, each part in the distribution chain can effectively determine where it received produce, and keep tracking back to the farm.

Nevertheless, the produce industry understands better than anyone that we need the most efficient and quickest traceability systems possible. We have the most to gain from isolating produce that may be part of a problem as quickly as possible, and a similar incentive to rule out concerns about produce that is clearly not related to a problem. That’s why United Fresh joined with PMA and CPMA last year to launch an initiative to build better transparency, a common framework and nomenclature for case labeling, and streamlined connectivity across the supply chain. That initiative is guided by a Steering Committee of more than 50 produce retailers, wholesalers, distributors, packer-shippers and growers. The committee has met four times this year and is now finalizing action plans and timelines for industry adoption. That’s the best example I know of an industry committed to constant improvement in traceability, not one that requires more government regulation to get the job done.

As you can tell, there’s a lot going on. We’re getting lots of member questions, so I wanted to answer as many of them here as I could. Let’s look forward to clearer days ahead.

Tom Stenzel
President
United Fresh Produce Association