Action Alert on Food Safety Legislation

From the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition...

FOOD SAFETY ACTION ALERT!
November 12, 2009
MAKE A CALL TO PROTECT FAMILY FARMS,
LOCAL FOOD SYSTEMS AND SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE

CALL SENATOR CASEY THIS WEEK!

The Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee will take up S. 510, the Senate version of major food safety legislation already approved by the House of Representatives, next Wednesday, November 18.

The bill would put real teeth into federal regulation of large-scale food processing corporations to better protect consumers. However, the bill as written is also a serious threat to family farm value added processing, local and regional food systems, conservation and wildlife protection, and organic farming.

We need a food safety bill that cracks down on corporate bad actors without erecting new barriers to the growing healthy food movement based on small and mid-sized family farms, sustainable and organic production methods, and more local and regional food sourcing.

The National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition and the National Organic Coalition, have fashioned five common sense amendments to S 510. We need your help to make them happen! The House has already passed their Bill. This is our last best chance to affect the final legislation.

Step 1: Make a Call

Please Call Senator Casey's office at (202) 224-6324 and ask for the aide in charge of food safety issues. Tell them you are a constituent and are calling to ask the Senator to support the amendments proposed by the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition and the National Organic Coalition to the Food Safety Modernization Act. Specifically, ask your Senator to support the following key changes to the bill:

• The bill should direct FDA to narrow the kinds of value-added farm processing activities which are subject to FDA control and to base those regulations on sound risk analysis. (Current FDA rules assume without any scientific evidence that all farms which undertake any one of a long list of processing activities should be regulated.)
  

• The bill should direct FDA to ease compliance for organic farmers by integrating the FDA standards with the organic certification rules. FDA compliance should not jeopardize a farmer's ability to be organically certified under USDA's National Organic Program.
  

• The bill must provide small and mid-sized family farms that market value-added farm products with training and technical assistance in developing food safety plans for their farms.
  

• The bill should insist that FDA food safety standards and guidance will not contradict federal conservation, environmental, and wildlife standards and practices, and not force the farmer to choose which federal agency to obey and which to reject.
  

• Farmers who sell directly to consumers should not be required to keep records and be part of a federal "traceaback" system, and all other farms should not be required to maintain records electronically or any records beyond the first point of sale past the farmgate.
  

Step 2: Report Your Call

Let us know how your Senator responded by clicking here http://salsa.wiredforchange.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=iDwJjwNOL9Ow7ubh59KDmnf2vBJtLWG%2B and typing in a brief report.

Step 3: Learn More

For more information on the Senate Food Safety bill, please see NSAC's Talking Points here http://salsa.wiredforchange.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=ZMugpdHrZ%2B5jVzlGNRk2rHf2vBJtLWG%2B and its Policy Brief Food Safety on the Farm here: http://salsa.wiredforchange.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=N0qoiyP9CL10FyBbFnz%2Fjnf2vBJtLWG%2B

A Losing Battle

I’ve been entirely remiss lately with the frequency of my posts. There’s been so much going on that it’s been difficult to pick which ones to devote some time to, and, in the end, indecision and laziness prevail.

Well, that, and when you write as part of your day-job, sometimes the thought of banging away on a keyboard into the evening—after you’ve scrambled to get a child to tae kwon-do; made, scarfed down, and cleaned up dinner; given kids baths; put kids to bed; made kids’ lunches for the next day; done a little laundry; paid some bills; and who knows what else—offers little appeal.

Anyway, I guess you could say that there’s a theme to the two following stories. And that theme would be: Our government stinks. When it comes to food policy in this country, legislators and the current administration will pay lip service to things like good nutrition and supporting “family farmers,” but where the seeds meet the soil, they almost uniformly side with the powerful interests working against these important objectives.

For example, there was a great op-ed in Sunday’s New York Times by Jack Hedin, who runs a small organic farm in Minnesota. Mr. Hedin explained how, to meet increased demand for his organic fruits and veggies, he rented some land from another farmer who raised only commodity crops.

But the arrangement ran into some problems with the Feds, namely the USDA’s Farm Service Agency, which manages the massive U.S. farm subsidies program:

The commodity farm program effectively forbids farmers who usually grow corn or the other four federally subsidized commodity crops (soybeans, rice, wheat and cotton) from trying fruit and vegetables. Because my watermelons and tomatoes had been planted on “corn base” acres, the Farm Service said, my landlords were out of compliance with the commodity program.

I’ve discovered that typically, a farmer who grows the forbidden fruits and vegetables on corn acreage not only has to give up his subsidy for the year on that acreage, he is also penalized the market value of the illicit crop, and runs the risk that those acres will be permanently ineligible for any subsidies in the future. (The penalties apply only to fruits and vegetables — if the farmer decides to grow another commodity crop, or even nothing at all, there’s no problem.) [emphasis added]

In one sense, I can understand where the Feds are coming from. The farmer from whom the land is being rented is, I guess, double dipping: getting paid by the government to grow only corn or, worse yet, nothing on his land, and then renting out that land and getting paid again.

The problem, however, is the same: No incentive to grow fruits and vegetables, but you get paid to grow corn and soy and other crops so that mega-corporations like Tyson or Pepsi have access to cheap feed for chickens or high fructose corn syrup for soda.

And it gets worse. Mr. Hedin?

The federal farm program is making it next to impossible for farmers to rent land to me to grow fresh organic vegetables.

Why? Because national fruit and vegetable growers based in California, Florida and Texas fear competition from regional producers like myself. Through their control of Congressional delegations from those states, they have been able to virtually monopolize the country’s fresh produce markets.

Last year, Midwestern lawmakers proposed an amendment to the farm bill that would provide some farmers, though only those who supply processors, with some relief from the penalties that I’ve faced — for example, a soybean farmer who wanted to grow tomatoes would give up his usual subsidy on those acres but suffer none of the other penalties. However, the Congressional delegations from the big produce states made the death of what is known as Farm Flex their highest farm bill priority, and so it appears to be going nowhere, except perhaps as a tiny pilot program.

I’m sorry. I thought Congress worked for the people, not big companies. Silly me.

Or, in an absolutely expected development, President Bush’s final budget of his reign of terror administration has eliminated the funding for Pasture Systems and Watershed Research Unit at Penn State.

This is a big deal for research into things like sustainable farming, keeping waterways safe from runoff, etc. As a letter from the researchers about the situation explains:

Unless Congress acts to restore the $4.42 million allocation in support of the University Park location, the entire research program will be terminated and all 45 scientist and support staff positions will be abolished.

The research program at University Park seeks to develop profitable and sustainable animal, crop, and bioenergy producing enterprises while maintaining the quality of ground and surface waters. The loss of this research unit would end cutting edge research on nutrient management, forage and grazing land management, water quality, integrated farming systems, and bioenergy cropping systems for the northeastern U.S.

I believe Sam Fromartz, proprietor of ChewsWise, summed it up best:

In light of the growing demand for grass-fed meat and pasture-based dairy farming in the northeast, I find it incredible that this program is being killed. We need more research into sustainable agriculture, not less.

But then we wouldn’t be able to offer $5.1 billion more in commodity crop subsidies, would we?

Excuse me while I go vomit.

Looming Breakdowns?

Michael Pollan had an excellent piece in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, discussing just what the term “sustainable” really means in the context of agriculture and food production.

To call a practice or system unsustainable is not just to lodge an objection based on aesthetics, say, or fairness or some ideal of environmental rectitude. What it means is that the practice or process can’t go on indefinitely because it is destroying the very conditions on which it depends. It means that, as the Marxists used to say, there are internal contradictions that sooner or later will lead to a breakdown.

He cites two examples of looming breakdowns to illustrate a larger point about the unsustainable practices in agriculture today, including one about the extreme reliance on antibiotics on huge factory farms, where pigs and chickens and cattle are raised in such tight, and terribly filthy, quarters that infections, once unleashed, can race through inmate population like horses at the beginning of a Triple Crown race.

Public-health experts have been warning us for years that this situation is a public-health disaster waiting to happen. Sooner or later, the profligate use of these antibiotics — in many cases the very same ones we depend on when we’re sick — would lead to the evolution of bacteria that could shake them off like a spring shower. It appears that “sooner or later” may be now. Recent studies in Europe and Canada found that confinement pig operations have become reservoirs of MRSA. A European study found that 60 percent of pig farms that routinely used antibiotics had MRSA-positive pigs (compared with 5 percent of farms that did not feed pigs antibiotics). This month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a study showing that a strain of “MRSA from an animal reservoir has recently entered the human population and is now responsible for [more than] 20 percent of all MRSA in the Netherlands.”

And, by the way, it’s not just the animals infected with these resistant bacteria. According to a new Johns Hopkins study, it’s the people who work with them.

Poultry workers in the United States are 32 times more likely to carry E. coli bacteria resistant to the commonly used antibiotic, gentamicin, than others outside the poultry industry, according to a recent study conducted by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

[snip]

Currently 16 different antimicrobial drugs are approved for use in U.S. poultry production, with gentamicin reported to be the most widely used.

This is a huge part of why we try our best to buy our chicken, pork, and beef from local farms. The chicken and pork, in particular, not only tastes much better, but I know that I’m supporting farms that are doing things the “right” way – not damaging the environment, treating their animals well, and not promoting potential public health nightmares like rampant antibiotic resistance.

We’re fortunate to have access to these local farms and their products and, when necessary, to purchase meat sourced from somewhat more sustainably raised animals at places like Whole Foods. I know that’s not the case for a lot of people and I would never say that those with limited means should make sacrifices to purchase more sustainably produced products.

However, when scientists like Dr. Terry Etherton at Penn State – part of Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture Secretary Dennis Wolff’s infamous Food Labeling Advisory Committee -- claims that people like me, who are concerned about the use of antibiotics and synthetic growth hormones in the source animals for our food supply, are just snake oil salesmen who are “anti-ag, anti-biotech, and anti-science … who use campaigns of misinformation and junk science to scare consumers,” I’d like to take information like this Hopkins study and smack him over the head with it.

There are unintended effects, Dr. Etherton, of the way the majority of animals for food productions are now raised in this country. And while you may see unlimited use of antibiotics and growth hormones as an important part of the solution, there are mounting data that say using them in such an irresponsible manner on massive factory farms may be creating more problems than they are solving.

At the moment, their use may make a T-bone or a pork tenderloin more affordable for Joe and Jane American, but in the not-so-distant future, it may mean increasing rates of infections with antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria or maybe increased rates of cancer. So if we’re going to debate the facts – which is what Dr. Terry Etherton says is the purpose of his blog -- let’s talk about all of them, not just a carefully defined subset.

As one funny and wise blogger once wrote: Just. Friggin’. Sayin’.

* Image from University of California