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Several new bills for food safety legislation, recently introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives, have local farmers and small farm supporters disgruntled.
The new legislation attempts to establish increased regulations to ensure food safety.
People against the bill say legislators are “viewing all agriculture as big agriculture” and that the new laws will adversely affect small farms.
The bills come on the heels of a rash of recent illnesses and deaths related to poor sanitation and inspection in the United States’ food supply. These incidents were reflected locally when the University of Maine stopped selling many peanut products. This was part of a nationwide response to the sickening of nearly 700 people and the death of at least nine related to a salmonella outbreak at the headquarters of the Peanut Corporation of America.
On April 9, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a report, “The incidence of the most common food-borne illnesses has changed very little over the past three years” and that the CDC “recognizes that [it has] reached a plateau in the prevention of food-borne disease.”
The most controversial of these bills may be the Food Safety Modernization Act – H.R. 875. The bill calls for the establishment of a Food Safety Administration within the Department of Health and Human Services. Aside from reorganizing the Food and Drug Administration – which would become the Federal Drug and Device Administration – the law would direct the new administrator of food safety to strengthen and expand food-borne illness surveillance systems and establish a national traceability system for food, among other things.
One e-mail circulating the Web about the bill titled “Possible Outlawing of Organic Farming” says Congress will – in a week and a half – vote on a bill that will outlaw organic farming.
“I’ve received literally several hundred e-mails about H.R. 875,” said Russ Libby, the executive director of the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association.
The other bills are the Food and Drug Administration Globalization Act – H.R. 759 – the TRACE Act – H.R. 814 – and the Safe FEAST Act – H.R. 1332. Libby says they place increased emphasis on electronic tracking for “anything a farm produces,” which could burden small farms.
“[I] actually would like someone to pay attention to food that’s moving across the country. . The policy can’t be ‘don’t do anything’ because that has been the policy for the past eight years – or 28 years more accurately,” Libby said.
Libby feels the conversation must shift for Congress to create effective policy.
Don Flannery, the assistant executive director of the Maine Potato Board, agreed.
“There’s reasonable [food] traceability and there’s something you could consider unreasonable,” Flannery said.
Flannery said the industry has comparatively advanced safety standards, saying “you can go into any supermarket and that [potato] bag will have some means of tracing.” He said public policy must strike a balance between public safety and the means of the food industry.
“Are we going to take the traceability to roadside stands . or try to trace every single potato? If we got to go to that level, we’re going to get in trouble,” Flannery said.
Local farmers and UMaine students with a future in agriculture have expressed outrage with the potential for regulations on their small operations.
“They’re making this huge blanket bill for any sort of agriculture,” said Hayley Williams, a fourth-year sustainable agriculture student who plans to be a farmer.
“They’re mostly concerned about the big farms in California . and it just won’t work for a place like Maine – organic places and smaller farms. They’re requiring so much; you’d have to change your whole structure for marketing and for post-harvest handling, which I don’t think people have the money to do.”
“This kind of licensing could put us under,” said fifth-year earth sciences student Nathan Mietkiewicz, who has been head cheesemaker and all-around farmhand with Orono’s Olde Oak Farm for a year and a half. “It could be the nail in the coffin for farmers’ markets around the country. My reaction was, ‘there goes local community, there goes local food, there goes everything the buy-local movement has brought.’”
Scott Boulanger, co-owner of the goat cheese producing Olde Oak Farm, expressed particular frustration with H.R. 1332, which would establish additional standards for animal handling.
“I would have to follow another set of regulations on top of the local regulations and that’s bulls—,” Boulanger said. “In theory, [the regulations] are brilliant. We should be [following them], but if you’re food processing it should be instinctual and not because you’re being forced. This is all about behavior. It has been proven over and over and over that legislation does not change behavior.”
Hayley Williams said basic faults in farm operations are at the root of many of the recent food safety crises.
“The mistakes that have been made are so obvious. Like having contaminated water leach into your field, having a farm field below an animal farm. It’s just not smart. There must be some more common sense way of doing it than having this huge new organization,” Williams said.
Boulanger said he and partner Jenn Maeverde both have full-time jobs in addition to operating their farm.
“We’ve jumped through every fiery hoop they’ve put in front of us, and every [laboratory test for microbes] that we get back goes way beyond the minimal standards [for sanitation],” Maeverde said. She said if she is to produce the highest-quality products, she needs to be focusing on it and not spending time adhering to additional regulations.
“The legislators need to come here and see what we’re doing. Get your hands dirty, man. See what it’s really like,” Maeverde said.
“The voices of small people are under-represented in Congress,” Libby said.
Libby said policy needs to depend on a food producer’s operation. He traveled to Washington, D.C., twice in the past two weeks to talk with congressional staff about the potential legislation, which has been referred to the House Committee on Agriculture and the House Committee on Energy and Commerce for discussion and revision. He said the conversations have been encouraging, and he believes the bills will be changed and moderated significantly in committee.
Representative Chellie Pingree, D-Maine, who has a degree in human ecology from the College of the Atlantic, originally co-sponsored H.R. 875, according to her communications director Willy Ritch. She has since rescinded her support of the bill.
“She heard from a lot of people that she knows in Maine, and there were enough questions raised in her mind that she felt this might not be the best policy,” Ritch said.
Bangor Daily News