How much do you know about the proposed food safety bill.
News coming out of Congress is dominated by immigration and the climate bill right now—and rightfully so, it's a mess. But they're dealing with other issues as well, and one bill currently before the Senate would step up regulations meant to improve food safety.
The House already passed its own, much tougher version of the legislation last summer and if/when the Senate bill passes, Congress could merge them. The Senate's version is a little easier on small and biologically diversified farms than is the House's, and includes language requiring the FDA to consider farm size, crop diversity, organic requirements and other issues that are important not only for the preservation of balanced ecosystems and soil fertility (and hopefully the prevention of wildlife poisonings), but for the survival of small farms.
These provisions are essential in a bill that many argue would otherwise be a "complete disaster" for small farms, and would ultimately be worse for the environment. And they do not address the food industry's real problems, like confined animal feeding operations (also known as CAFOs, also known as industrial slaughterhouses).
The health of small farms aside, emphasizing the wrong aspects of food safety also encourages the trend of fixing a misdiagnosis of the problem, as if putting a cast on a healthy leg would heal a broken arm. This is from the San Francisco Chronicle's recent story on the issue:
Large produce buyers such as Wal-Mart and McDonald's have gone much further than the industry standards. They have imposed rules of their own that have forced many California farmers who supply them to fence off waterways, poison wildlife to keep animals out of fields and destroy crop hedgerows that support beneficial insects.
Deputy Agriculture Secretary Kathleen Merrigan said Monday the administration is keeping a "close watch" on these so-called "super metrics," acknowledging that they have harmed the environment but said, "nobody gets a pass on food safety."
The story quotes Tom Willey, of Madera, California's T&D Willey Farms, saying that many food safety rules tend "to push us to embrace a paradigm of sterility," which is a dangerous path for the long-term because: "When you create microbial vacuums, they can be even more easily taken over by pathogenic organisms... In organic agriculture, we depend tremendously on a cooperative effort with beneficial microorganisms... Soil fertility planetwide is based on that."
The proposed regulations also do not address another, much more real danger—what many believe to be the source of E. coli contamination, for example, not to mention the longer-term issues of environmental contamination and antibiotics in our food and water supplies: CAFOs, which are regulated by the USDA, not the FDA.
Because they are bringing in less money than large farms, the increased costs of compliance with the new rules (such as increased paperwork, dealing with bureaucracy, meeting different standards for different foods) puts them at a disadvantage—the Chronicle cites a UC Davis study showing that costs can be as high as $100 an acre.
