Among the many bills the Senate may take up before the August recess is one that would update food-safety standards for the first time in more than 70 years. The bill passed the House a year ago, in the wake of several outbreaks of food-borne illness. The bill, the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009, does many commendable things, including making producers and growers more responsible for ensuring food safety before produce is shipped and giving the Food and Drug Administration itself recall power over fresh produce. (Recalls are now voluntary after a problem has been identified.) It would also give the FDA access to shipping records, so that it is easier to tell where illnesses start and where they have spread.
But part of what's holding up the bill is that it treats all producers the same. While a slew of special-interest groups -- including the Grocery Manufacturers Association, the American Frozen Food Institute, the American Farm Bureau, General Mills, and Kraft -- have signed on to support the bill, opposition is coming from coalitions of small and organic farmers and the American Grassfed Association. Their concern is over the bill's record-keeping requirements and its emphasis on "science based" contamination removal; they believe requirements that make food more traceable and sterile will overburden the small and local producers who sell directly to consumers.
This is where two progressive goals in food politics butt up against one another. Giving the government more power to regulate and recall bad food is a needed update to our outdated food-safety system. But the new food-safety legislation is a reaction to a system that is easily overwhelmed by bad practices; it fails to encourage the sorts of best practices currently found in smaller-scale, lower-volume production.
Those opposing the original bill are lobbying for amendments introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders and Sen. Jon Tester, among others. The Sanders amendment would help narrow the definition of what "processed" means, since the current FDA definition is so broad that it could include cutting the tops off carrots or boiling maple syrup as processing that needs to be regulated. "It's been sort of a translation problem between the byzantine details of current FDA regulations," says Ferd Hoefner, policy director for the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition.
Other provisions included in an amendment introduced by Tester, and supported by Sen. Kay Hagan, would exempt small farmers from some of the bill's new requirements for produce, specifically the "science based" standards that the FDA determines minimize the risk of problems. As Jill Richardson writes in La Vida Locavore, "The government tends to think that something sterile that has been sprayed with every pesticide in the book is safer than something organic if the organic item has been touched by human hands or grown with manure as fertilizer." Indeed, after the 2006 E. coli outbreak in spinach, many producers and sellers, including Wal-Mart, increased the emphasis on sterilization of produce rather than regulating the types of farming practices that increase the risk of contamination. That can be an extra cost burden to smaller producers who grow fewer acres of produce, and, in the case of the spinach contamination, lead to an overly hostile environment for wildlife in California.
Under current rules, small farms that sell more than half their products directly to consumers are exempt from many of the FDA rules, and Hoefner says the Tester amendment would extend this exemption. The problems comes, of course, in defining what qualifies as a small farm. Tester's amendment uses an income threshold of $500,000, and that is why many food-safety advocates think it is a bad deal. Food Safety News writes that the threshold would include 95 percent of domestic producers. A more nuanced approach would take into account not only size as measured in sales but also acreage, processing methods, and distribution reach as well.
For now, it looks as if small-farm exemptions will be included in the final Senate bill. But even if they pass, there is still a lot of work to be done to reconcile the Senate version with the very different House version, which doesn't include considerations for small, local farmers. Rules that don't take farm size and processing methods into account have plagued local slaughterhouses and meat processors. As Heather Rogers wrote in the most recent issue of the Prospect, the Department of Agriculture rules for meat-processing are meant to address the threats that come from large, industrial-scale slaughterhouses, but many of those issues are averted simply by slaughtering fewer animals more slowly and carefully.
Exemptions for smaller farms are keeping the bill in the Senate for now. (The bill is also being held up due to an amendment introduced by Sen. Dianne Feinstein that would ban the use of bisphenol-A that is drawing industry ire.) It's hard to argue against increased food safety, but the current legislation does little to address the bifurcated regulatory system. Meaningful food-safety reform involves addressing the way we produce meat and vegetables as well as the scale at which we produce them.
