New Food Bill May Render Family and Organic Farms Extinct

The U.S. Senate is expected to vote this week on S. 510: The FDA Food Safety Modernization Act. Its companion bill, the Food Safety Enhancement Act (HR 2749), passed by the House of Representatives in the summer of 2008, issued more power to the FDA, required a farm registration fee of $500 and monolithic application of complex monitoring and traceability standards small farms cannot afford to implement.

Although the Food Safety Modernization Act was crafted to improve overall food safety, unless an amendment is included proposed by Senator Jon Tester (D-MT) that would exempt small, local farms from the bill’s hazard analysis and risk-based preventative controls and traceability requirements, the bill will force small local farms and co-ops out of business, thus consolidating the control our nation’s food supply among a small and powerful cabal consisting of a handful of corporations like Monsanto, Cargill, and Tyson.

Mark Kastel, co-director of the Wisconsin-based Cornucopia Institute, has received e-mails from small farmers around the country who say they’ll be forced out of business because of the bill’s fees and inspection requirements they are not equipped to handle.

But it’s not just small farmers who could lose. The bill could also work against the growing number of consumers who are voting with their pocketbooks to support small-scale agriculture, Kastel said.

According to Helena Bottemiller with Food Safety News, eighty-seven groups, including the Center for Food Safety, Food Democracy Now!, R-CALF USA and dozens of food co-ops, recently signed a letter in support of an amendment proposed by Senator Jon Tester (D-MT) that would exempt small, local processing facilities from the bill’s hazard analysis and risk-based preventative controls and traceability requirements.

“Farmers and processors who sell directly to consumers and end users have a direct relationship with their customers that ensures quality, safety, transparency and accountability,” said the letter. “In addition, small-scale food producers are already regulated by local and state authorities, and the potential risk their products pose is inherently limited by their size. For these farmers and processors, new federal requirements are unnecessary and would simply harm both the food producers and their consumers.”

“There’s no doubt that industrial agriculture needs better oversight. But family-scale local and organic farms are probably the safest in the nation–they are part of the solution, not part of the problem–and need to be protected,” said The Cornucopia Institute in an action alert last week.

Beginning Farmers.org voiced similar concerns: “Congress needs to solve the real problems – chemical-intensive agriculture, factory farms, industrialized and centralized food production and distribution, and often tainted imported foods – and not regulate organic and small farms out of business. (S. 510) is a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach that will unnecessarily burden both farmers and small-scale food processors, ultimately depriving consumers of the choice to buy from producers they know and trust.”

Despite the surface pledge to food safety of both House and Senate bills, livestock producers and any other entity regulated by the USDA are exempt from the new regulations included in S.510 and HR 2749.

Andrew Kimbrell, Executive Director of the Center for Food Safety, says members of Congress were so committed to the interests of big industrial meat producers that they also prohibited the FDA from “impeding, minimizing, or affecting” USDA authority on meat, poultry, and eggs.