The Enforcement Strategy for Marketed Ingredients (ESMI) Working Group of the Association of Animal Feed Control Officers (AAFCO) cited an increasing number of unapproved or undefined ingredients appearing in animal feed and pet food as well as “growing concerns about consumer protection, protection of animal health, and food safety” as the reason behind taking a more active role in enforcement. The group intends to initially target one ingredient for regulatory attention at the state and federal level, and that ingredient will be the focus of its enforcement activities. The first target ingredient for upcoming enforcement actions, identified at the AAFCO annual meeting in August, is comfrey contained in feed, feed ingredients, or supplements to be added to feed. State regulators intend to seek out feed products with comfrey and stop the sales of these products. (For additional information on the planned enforcement action, check the AAFCO Website at www.aafco.org.)

Earlier this year, AAFCO (a non-profit organization of state and federal feed regulators that has no regulatory power, but helps guide national interpretation of feed laws) planned to select one or more animal feed supplement ingredients and stage a nationwide “regulatory event” in order to bring attention to the problem of illegal animal supplements.

The threat of a supplement regulatory crackdown motivated 25 industry participants to join with the National Animal Supplement Council (NASC) to hammer out a proposed Compliance Plus program early this year. This program gives supplement manufacturers a starting point to constructively work with state and federal regulators on a mutually acceptable way to bring supplements for non-human food chain animals into compliance without unfairly penalizing responsible industry participants, according to NASC president Bill Bookout.

“I understand the frustration of regulators because it may have seemed that the industry was just ignoring requests for compliance,” said Bookout after the initial compliance program was designed. “However, the issues are complicated by the broad availability of human products containing many of the same ingredients and the lack of patent protection for product formulations. Our hope is that we can, in cooperation with the regulatory agencies, jointly develop a solution that can work for everyone