Food Safety and Modernization Act

On November 29th, the U.S. Senate passed Senate Bill 510, the Food Safety and Modernization Act.  Highly controversial, this act was a response to the rash of food-borne illnesses in the country over the last several years.  The idea behind the bill is to have more accountability within the food production system, and the regulations are mainly designed for the largest of industrial food producers.  This is problematic for many mid-size farmers, though thanks to the Tester Amendment, small farms (those making less than $500,000 in revenue per year) are mainly exempt from the provisions of the bill.  For those farms that exceed the $500,000 threshold, fees, fines and taxes will increase.  Large-scale production facilities and corporations will be able to absorb these new costs fairly easily, but this could lead to an even stronger division between large and small-scale farms by removing the mid-size farm from the picture.  If these mid-size farms can't pay for all the proposed inspections and upgrades, this act could easily drive them out of business.

One of the most controversial elements of this act doesn't look that controversial on the surface.  The act calls for increased inspections of farms.  That sounds great, until one digs a little deeper and discovers that increased inspections means only once every three years for high-risk facilities.  Additionally, the bill puts the FDA and U.S. farms under the control of Homeland Security, installs as "food czar" a former Monsanto executive, and gives the FDA the power to initiate and enforce recalls (a power most people are surprised to learn they didn't have before).

Though the bill that passed is somewhat better than the initial draft of the bill (which would have made seed-saving, home gardening and food storage, organic farming, and family farming essentially illegal), many people fear what this means for the future of our food.  Though designed to protect us, it could ultimately disconnect us even more from our food.  If these regulations ever change to include small farmers, it could spell the end of small-scale agriculture and food production.  Since it champions the use of chemicals and antibiotics for industrial-scale production, what health problems will we face down the line? And if the FDA decides it doesn't like certain products, say raw milk, that could mean a total ban on the production of these foods.

Don't you feel safer already?

For the time being though, the bill is stalled on Constitutional grounds, as the it stipulates the creation of new farming taxes, a power that the Senate does not have.  As Congress and the Senate duke it out over the bill and what powers each body can exert, let's keep up with our farmer's market shopping and give support to those groups that could be hurt the most by this bill.

You can check out the entirety of the bill here.

Happy eating!