Congress is trying to pass a long, broad and sweeping bill through to reform the food safety of the United States. It has the pretty name of Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009. The bill, H.R 875 was introduced in February by Democrat Rosa DeLauro, which raised the first red flags on the Internet. The red flag was that this could be a major conflict of interest considering that Congresswoman DeLauro’s husband Stanley Greenburg has business connections with Monsanto, the world’s largest producer of herbicides and genetically altered seeds. All anyone has to do is hear the name Monsanto combined with new food laws and the red flags and Internet comes alive, and for good reason if you look back at the history of Monsanto and our food safety.
This bill is large and does a number of things. So large it is at last count 117 Adobe pdf pages long. It will create a new government entity, the Food Safety Administration inside of the Health and Human Services agency. It will change the name of the Food and Drug Agency (FDA) to the Federal Drug and Device Administration, which will also be called the FDA just so we don’t think they changed anything. The new FDA will share facilities and resources with the Federal Safety Administration (FSA).
This new law could affect the small farmer and family farms, organic farmers, your local farmers market and some say even your own backyard garden. In section 3 (14) of this proposed law it defines what a food production facility is as “The term ‘food production facility’ means any farm, ranch, orchard, vineyard, aquaculture facility, or confined animal-feeding operation.”
Section 406 Presumption states, “In any action to enforce the requirements of the food safety law, the connection with interstate commerce required for jurisdiction shall be presumed to exist.” And section 3 definitions, defines the broad areas that would be required to follow this law. Section 3 (9) “The term category 5 food establishment means a food establishment that stores, holds or transports food products prior to delivery for retail sales.” That is so broadly written it could mean baking cookies at home and then taking them to the bake sale. Have you ever grown and cooked something out of your own garden and given it to someone else. Yes in a legal sense this law could possibly regulate you and your own garden.
Of course that is being nitpicky, but lawyers are very nitpicky and lawyers wrote this bill, lawyers will be the ones who will have to decipher it later when the holes are filled in and lawyers will handle this when it is challenged in court. Politicians, judges and administrators are lawyers.
The bill also will govern the minimum standards of the use of fertilizers. Sec. 206 (C) “Establish science based minimum standards”. Who is going to write these minimum standards and based on what science. The wording minimum use of fertilizer doesn’t say anything about not using fertilizer or chemicals. The bill is so broadly written that it is open to many different types of interpretations. There are a lot of questions and a lot of possible answers. But when something is this broadly written and open to interpretation, who is going to provide the final answers, the government, politicians, judges, lawyers or an administrator who might have formerly worked for a large agribusiness corporation.
Do we need more laws like this or just better inspections under our current laws. The recent salmonella case with peanut butter has people fed up with the current state of our food inspections and food safety.
Starting an entirely new government agency costs a lot of money and this new bill would cost taxpayers an enormous amount of money. Wouldn’t this money be better spent hiring more food inspectors and maintaining our current laws. Just the change in administration names on logos, web pages, signs and stationary is enough to hire many more inspectors. Every time we have a food problem, the government says the problem is they can’t hire enough inspectors. That’s an easy problem to fix without going to this extreme and expensive new law.
Politicians tell us that they are in favor of smaller and less intrusive government and less government spending and then they write bills like this. Somewhere the spending has to stop or they need to do a better job of spending the amount of money they do have. Do we really want the government telling farmers how to plant, fertilize, weed and grow our food. There is a difference between regulations and actually telling farmers how to grow food. They have been doing a fine job for of growing food for hundreds of years.
Proponents of this bill say that there is nothing in it that will regulate home gardens, bake sales or farmers markets. The fact is there is nothing in this bill that says they cannot and will not regulate gardens, bake sales or farmers markets either.
Do I think the government will regulate your garden and bake sales, no I don’t. But in this day and age where zero tolerance is the same as zero common sense, who really knows anymore.
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