(April 15, 2010)—America’s food safety laws need tightening, but not if small producers and farmers’ markets are harmed, said U.S. Sen. Jon Tester, who worries that new reforms could clobber the local-food movement.
Wednesday,
the Montana Democrat rolled out two amendments exempting small food
producers from a broad overhaul of food-borne illness regulations.
The
Food Safety Modernization Act is headed to the Senate floor next week.
Proponents say the act is good medicine for a food industry stricken by
high-profile outbreaks of E. coli and salmonella in recent years. Among
other things, the bill requires better record keeping, testing and
tracking from food producers of all sizes.
Small producers, who
contend they’re not the source of the nation’s food problems, say the
costs of meeting the new regulations will put them out of business.
“What
they’re really after is having everybody who makes or sells a product
have a tracking system,” said Perry McNeese of Good Earth Market.
“That’s one piece of it. That kind of record keeping for a small
producer can become astronomical.”
Good Earth Market relies upon
81 small vendors producing everything from baked goods to jam, McNeese
said. Most of those businesses are one-person operations. Collectively,
they might do less than $400,000 in business a year with the Billings
food cooperative. The tight relationship Good Earth has with its vendors
would make it easy to respond to any food problem, he said. The small
vendors are responsive in ways larger ones aren’t.
Tester echoed
those sentiments while announcing his amendments during a press
conference between Senate votes.
“We’re really taking a punch at
people who don’t need to have a punch taken at them,” Tester said.
State
and local regulations apply to small producers, which should be enough,
the senator said. His two amendments would assure that producers with
adjusted gross incomes of less than $500,000 a year would only answer to
state and local laws for processed food. Producers selling food
directly through farmers’ markets would also be exempt.
Not
everyone believes local food is so wholesome that it should be exempted
from food safety reforms. Howard Reid, who oversees food and consumer
safety for Montana’s Department of Public Health and Human Services,
said the food-borne illnesses handled by his office stem from various
sources, including small producers. For that reason, he supports
regulating small producers under the Food Safety Modernization Act.
Sandra
Eskin, who oversees food safety issues for the Pew Charitable Trusts,
said Montana has food-borne illness outbreaks in its fairly recent past.
In 1995, E. coli contaminated lettuce sickened nearly 100 people in the
Missoula area. Health officials traced the outbreak back to a
half-dozen lettuce farms selling produce under the same brand, but
that’s where they lost the trail. Without traceability, inspectors
weren’t able to positively identify which of the farms caused the
contamination. They did note that one Montana farm was using a
manure-contaminated stock pond to water its lettuce.
Eskin said
there should be regulation of scale, which she thinks the pending
legislation allows and the Food and Drug Administration and U.S.
Department of Agriculture will accommodate.
“I’m sympathetic to
their concerns,” Eskin said of the small producers, “but get in there
and give us solutions. Tell the FDA and USDA what you can do, not what
you can’t.”
Source:
billingsgazette.com
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