Grow Some Integrity, Grow Some Intelligence, Make The Call Before You Can Grow Nothing At All

 Scheduled for today, a very important bill to be voted on that will have an impact on your future that has yet to be fully realized.

 

S. 510: Oversight or Overreach?

Congress is likely to pick up S. 510, a sweeping overhaul of food safety regulation, in the lame duck session starting in November 2010.

By Patrick Tutwiler for GovTrack Insider

 

Oct. 15, 2010

 

In our first video seg­ment, Gov­Track In­sid­er re­porter Patrick Tutwiler in­ter­views Liz Re­itzig, the Sec­re­tary of the Na­tion­al In­de­pen­dent Con­sumers and Farm­ers As­so­ci­a­tion, about S. 510: Food Safe­ty Mod­ern­iza­tion Act. The bill is like­ly to come be­fore the Sen­ate in Novem­ber.

This is the first video in a se­ries of re­ports we plan on the sub­ject.
Also check out the 90-sec­ond sum­ma­ry of the bill by Main Street In­sid­er.
Tran­script:

Congress is like­ly to pick up S. 510, a sweep­ing over­haul of food safe­ty reg­u­la­tion, in the lame duck ses­sion start­ing in Novem­ber 2010. Many small farm­ing groups and or­gan­ic food en­thu­si­asts are wor­ried about the ef­fect the bill could have on the local and small farm pro­duc­tion chain.

Liz Re­itzig is Sec­re­tary of the Na­tion­al In­de­pen­dent Con­sumers and Farm­ers As­so­ci­a­tion.

 

Re­itzig: Sen­ate bill S. 510 is com­plete­ly flawed. 

Ques­tion from GovTrack.​us Users: Will this bill pre­vent me from hav­ing a home gar­den, shar­ing pro­duce with my friends, or dis­rupt in any way my local farmer’s mar­ket?

 

Re­itzig: What Sen­ate bill S. 510 does it is cre­ates statu­to­ry au­thor­i­ty for the FDA to come up with reg­u­la­tions gov­ern­ing all as­pects of food pro­duc­tion and pro­cess­ing. So whether or not it will af­fect a home gar­den or a farmer’s mar­ket, we prob­a­bly won’t see any­thing im­me­di­ate­ly af­fect­ing those, but once they come up with the reg­u­la­tions and start en­forc­ing we could see a dis­rup­tion in any­thing, any­thing from a farmer’s mar­ket to a child’s lemon­ade stand. 

Be­cause noth­ing is ex­plic­it­ly ex­empt­ed, so they are all im­plic­it­ly in­clud­ed. So the reg­u­la­tions could very eas­i­ly in­clude reg­u­la­tions such that they im­pose over­bur­den­some re­stric­tions on farm­ers going to mar­ket.

Gov­Track In­sid­er: But sure­ly it wasn’t the in­tent of the law­mak­ers to dis­rupt gar­dens or lemon­ade stands.

Re­itzig: Well I think the in­tent of the leg­is­la­tion is to give much broad­er au­thor­i­ty to the FDA, and then when you look at the lan­guage of the bill, when it gives the au­thor­i­ty to the FDA to act on “rea­son to be­lieve”, that’s giv­ing a lot of power, a lot of con­trol, to one per­son. 

An ex­am­ple of that is there is a thriv­ing and boom­ing fresh milk move­ment, peo­ple who want fresh milk di­rect­ly from farm­ers they know and trust. Well the FDA, CDC, and other or­ga­ni­za­tions have clear­ly said they don’t think any­body should drink fresh milk. If you go by that, they would have rea­son to be­lieve fresh milk might make some­body sick, and on that basis they could just shut down every fresh milk farmer, ev­ery­body who is sup­ply­ing fresh milk to a con­sumer be­cause they have that rea­son to be­lieve. Even if the in­tent is not ex­plic­it­ly stat­ed as con­trol over all farms, that is what is this leg­is­la­tion and they can use that to im­pose their world view on ev­ery­one. 

S. 510 does ex­empt small farm­ers and restau­rants from some of the FDA’s pro­posed new reg­u­la­to­ry au­thor­i­ty. How­ev­er, the scope of the final reg­u­la­tions will not be known until the law is en­act­ed and the FDA com­pletes the rule-mak­ing pro­cess.

 

Re­itzig: It’s like writ­ing a blank check to the FDA and say­ing now come up with the reg­u­la­tions. Once the bill is passed they can come up with what­ev­er reg­u­la­tions they want. Again for them to say we’re going to have reg­u­la­tions specif­i­cal­ly for small­er pro­duc­ers, they don’t yet have the reg­u­la­tions so how do we know what they are going to come up with? How do we know if it ac­tu­al­ly is going to ben­e­fit small pro­duc­ers or not? We don’t know, it’s this big un­known. And it’s this big blank check to the FDA who has al­ready been step­ping on small farms a lot.

 

 

Make the calls or send some faxes, it is up to us the moral maxes.

 

Snowe
Phone: (202) 224-5344 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting              (202) 224-5344      end_of_the_skype_highlighting
Toll Free: (800) 432-1599 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting              (800) 432-1599      end_of_the_skype_highlighting
Fax: (202) 224-1946

Collins
Washington, DC 20510
Phone: (202) 224-2523 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting              (202) 224-2523      end_of_the_skype_highlighting
Fax: (202) 224-2693