Food Safety Bill Could Add Costs to Local Processors

What does Bea’s Homade Products of Gills Rock have in common with Kraft? Not much, on the surface, but a bill passed by the House of Representatives July 30 slated for Senate consideration this fall would treat them nearly the same.

The Food Safety Enhancement Act (FSEA), HR 2749, was sponsored by Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.) in response to the high-profile food poisoning scares that received national attention in recent years. The salmonella contamination of peanut butter that killed nine people this year spurred many to call for stricter food safety measures.

The FSEA as written would require a processor like Bea’s to pay a $500 annual registration fee and maintain detailed records about the sourcing and processing of food. Though a company like Kraft processes far more product then Bea’s, they too would pay just the $500 fee.

The Food Safety Enhancement Act slated for Senate consideration this fall would subject small producers like Bea’s Homade Products in Gills Rock to many of the same fees and requirements of corporate giants like Kraft. Photo by Dan Eggert.

Jean Halloran, Director of Food Policy Initiatives for Consumers Union, publisher of Consumer Reports, said the bill has flaws but is vital to ensure the safety of the American food system.

“The purpose of this is to deal with the fact that one of every four Americans gets food poisoning each year,” she said. “Some high-risk facilities were getting inspected an average of once every 10 years. This would mandate that high-risk facilities be inspected by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) every six months to a year.”

She said the Consumers Union would prefer a two-tiered system in which small producers would pay less, but they’ve joined numerous consumer groups in endorsing the bill as is.

The plant responsible for the contaminated peanut butter that killed nine people hadn’t been inspected in eight years, Halloran said. The plant’s managers had found salmonella on at least a dozen occasions but never reported it. The new regulations would require the reporting of such findings.

Critics of FSEA worry about the broadened power it gives to the FDA, including the power to quarantine a geographic area, perform warrantless searches of business records, and establish a national food tracing system.

Early versions of the food safety bill would have put burdensome requirements on small farmers selling at farm markets and to local restaurants as well. An outcry from farmers and groups representing them forced legislatures to include exemptions.

The bill that passed through the House in July exempts farmers that sell direct to the consumer, such as at farm markets, or to restaurants and grocers that then sell directly to the customer.

Producers who sell directly to consumers, like those at farm markets, are exempted from fees and record-keeping required by the Food Safety Enhancement Act.

The FDA is charged with developing procedures to enforce the bill’s mandates within two years. Most specifically, they must come up with a procedure that enables them to trace food from the refrigerator to the farm of origin within two days.

Pete Kennedy of the Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund, a two-year-old organization formed to help small farmers facing legal action, said the bill wouldn’t accomplish its goal as written.

“It is a tremendous increase in power for the FDA,” he said. “But they don’t have the time or the resources to enforce it. It gives the FDA power to issue national standards for produce. Producers would be subject to federal standards, federal inspection, and warrantless record searches. They used to at least have to have a reason.”

The bill’s proponents say the FDA won’t have access to any records they don’t already have access to now. The FDA performed 6,800 inspections in 2008, but there are 150,000 food production facilities in the United States. Getting to each of them every three years, as the bill mandates, and to many of them every year, will require a huge influx of qualified inspectors and a lot more money. That doesn’t even address imported food, of which only one percent is subject to inspection today.

Kennedy worries that the legislation will be another step in taking farmers and small producers away from the reason they chose to farm – to grow and sell food – and further into the accounting business.

“They’re going to have to spend a lot of time just to comply with the paperwork requirements of the act,” he said. “If in violation, fines can pile up in a hurry.”

Kennedy said enforcement should be targeted at the types of companies responsible for the recent contaminations.

“The problems with our food safety in the United States are in the industrial food system,” he said. “Local producers are the solution. But they stand to be the ones most dramatically impacted by this. They could be regulated out of business, and consumers, who have increasingly turned to the local system, will be forced back to industrial producers.”

Mary Pat Carlson, director of the Algoma Farm Market Kitchen, said she doesn’t know for sure how it will impact users of the shared-use commercial kitchen.

“I’m trying to get myself as educated as I can about it,” she said. “So much work has been done in the last two years to promote small-scale farms, specialty foods, and buy-local initiatives that the timing of this just seems bad.”

She urged farmers and small processors to get educated and contact representatives with concerns.

“We need to make sure our small-scale producers have a voice on this bill,” she said. “Changes and tweaks will come from the grassroots.”

The FSEA will start the fall in the hands of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. That committee was chaired by the late Ted Kennedy, and must appoint a new chair before it begins its work. That committee is also charged with handling health care legislation, so it’s unclear how quickly it will move on the food safety bill.

“We’re hopeful they’ll turn their attention to this in the fall,” Halloran said. “They should be able to walk and chew gum at the same time.”

To learn more about and track the bill, visit http://www.opencongress.com and search for H.R. 2749.