The following is an excerpt from a post in The Ethicurean.
H.R. 875 is not likely to make it out of committee. The article points out a couple of other bills that are likely to get more traction and have scarier ramifications for small farmers and producers. Make sure you read the excellent position statement and information by Main Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association.
Food safety is all the rage this year in Congress, and rightfully so: between tainted jalapenos, spinach, peanuts, and pistachios, the food supply needs some major help. Everyone seems at the ready with their own version of the solution. But as I feared in a previous post on produce safety, many of the proposed solutions are expensive, technologically complex, and may not actually work.
Perhaps the worst of the lot is HR 1332, Rep. Costa’s Safe FEAST Act of 2009, which is backed by the Big Ag group Western Growers. It would create a HACCP system for produce. (HACCP is the set of burdensome recordkeeping requirements credited with hastening the demise of many small-scale slaughter facilities.) It doesn’t take the size of operations into account. It would pay for inspections by charging fees to farms and processors and would hand the duty of inspection over to third-party certifiers. Because yeah, that’s worked so well for us to date.
Then there’s Rep. DeGette’s H.R. 814, which actually does mandate a National Animal Identification System, which we and lots of other people have major concerns about. And there’s H.R. 759, offered by Rep. Dingell, which requires traceability of food from farm to restaurants and requires that the recordkeeping be done electronically. It also charges fees to processors — small or large — for inspections.
None of these bills are good for small farmers, and I hope we might agree that they would all be worse than H.R. 875.
So here’s the kicker: According to everyone with whom I’ve spoken on the Hill, H.R. 875 is dead in the water. Rep. Waxman, the chair of the committee with jurisdiction over food safety legislation, has made it clear he is not going to move DeLauro’s bill forward. Rep. Dingell’s H.R. 759 is the one that the committee will run with in all likelihood. Many inside-the-Beltway observers assume we’ll end up with a hybrid between Dingell’s bill and Costa’s Safe FEAST Act, much to the delight of Big Ag. In a slightly better-case scenario, parts of DeLauro’s bill will get inserted into the final product — parts that we are not helping her improve by calling her a Monsanto shill and promptly disengaging after we forward this email to all our food-movement acquaintances.
So what can we do?
I’m not OK with the assumption that we’ll end up with a Dingell-Costa monster hybrid to govern the safety of our food system. That’s because I think we have the potential to dramatically reform these bills when they move forward (which they haven’t yet). The frenzy over H.R. 875 shows that it is possible to mobilize a lot of people around a food safety bill, and it shows that there’s a groundswell of support for making food safety regulations small-farm friendly. If we can shift that energy to where it’s needed and hammer home our message — we want safe food and a diverse food system! — and then offer concrete alternatives, then I think we have some hope. MOFGA has a great synopsis of the principles that should guide this work; other groups from New England to North Carolina to California are developing on-farm food safety guidelines that work for small farms. That means we’ll have effective alternative models to show our legislators.
Congress isn’t going to move forward quickly with any of these bills, but we can start early by calling our representatives and telling them what we want to see in food safety legislation. Begin with MOGFA’s list and add your own from there. Mention the serious concerns with Costa’s and Dingell’s bills, H.R. 1332 and H.R. 759. When these bills begin moving forward, we’ll let you know and suggest other actions to take. Join the list-servs of the groups mentioned above that are working to strengthen DeLauro’s bill. And if you receive a misleading e-mail about H.R. 875, point the sender to some of these groups’ resources.
‘Cause I don’t know about you, but I think it’s high time that we set the food safety agenda instead of just reacting to it.
