HR 875 caused a virtual panic a few months ago among the farming and gardening community. All kinds of false claims and assumptions were made. Some said it would ban backyard gardens and organic growing. Others said it was all Monsanto’s doing; trying to monopolize the food system and trample organic farmers, backyard gardeners or consumers of fresh local foods into submission (not that they haven’t fantasized that.)
It was referred immediately to the House Agriculture Committee in February and has been stalled there ever since.
So now the geniuses in Congress introduced a new bill two weeks ago, HR 2749, which proposes even greater FDA regulatory powers over the national food supply and food providers, namely granting it the authority to regulate how crops are raised and harvested, to quarantine a geographic area, to make warrantless searches of business records, and to establish a national food tracing system.
Concurrently, the bill would impose annual registration fees of $500 on all facilities holding, processing, or manufacturing food and require that such facilities also engaged in the transport or packing of food maintain pedigrees of the origin and previous distribution history of the food.
The bill is an enhancement to H.R.759, and to a lesser extent, H.R. 857, previously proposed food safety bills in the 111th Congress. It is also co-sponsored by the same Representatives as the latter two bills, although new to the line of support is Rep. Henry Waxman, chair of the House Energy and Commerce committee.
In my opinion, the industrial and agribusiness controllers of our current food system do need more regulation in an attempt to make our food supply more safe. Stuffing these bills with ambiguous wording is something we do not need. Each new bill has more ambiguity added which will only create more panic among the public.
If you thought HR 875 was bad, this one sucks even more. Read a full text of the bill here. Hopefully, it will stall and die in committee like the bills proposed before it.
In a related development, the food cops of the Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Agriculture are getting more ammo after a food safety working group established by President Barack Obama said that the government will try and boost the safety of some of the nation’s most popular foods, announcing stricter rules for the production of eggs, poultry, beef, leafy greens, melons and tomatoes. The new standards are an effort to reduce instances of salmonella and E. coli contamination.
Graphic credit: Atlantic Free Press, part of the Free Press Group based in The Netherlands and an Open Source Journalism Project.
Hydroponics Dictionary
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Obviously I’m all for safe food. And the food one can’t trust is the industrial food, not the wholehearted organic raised varieties. Industrial Companies can afford $500 here and there, but that amount of money could make a small organic business uneconomic, especially with all this FUD.
http://www.consumersunion.org/blogs/nimf/2009/06/good_grief_could_it_be_true_1.html
With out the FDA making standards all you have is Big Food imposing their own standards on food growers (ie the scorched earth approach)- with no respect for environmental impact, organics or any other common sense approaches.
Furthermore, people are getting sick and dying. It seems like most reasonable people want to make sure that their loved ones are dying from spinach or peanuts.
Big Ag and other industry leaders don’t like this bill because it imposes real standards and safety measures so they are stirring up the small farmers to fight for them. Got to our blog post above to read the other side of the issue.