[sudo-discuss] [Food Crisis] Planned food safety rules rile organic farmers

[Eddie Che]

Fuck.... seriously?

On 3/2/14, Rudy Arredondo <hola_5 at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Planned food safety rules rile organic farmersLocal growers are discovering
> that proposed FDA regulations would
> curtail many common techniques, such as using house-made fertilizers and
>  irrigating from creeks.
> http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-food-safety-20140223,0,6831660.story#ixzz2ulcguKzG
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>                                         HUSTONTOWN, Pa. -- Jim
> Crawford was rushing to load crates of freshly picked organic tomatoes
> onto trucks heading for an urban farmers market when he noticed the
> federal agent.
>
>
>                                             A tense conversation followed as
> the visitor to his farm -- an inspector from the Food and Drug
> Administration -- warned him that some organic-growing techniques he had
> honed over four decades could soon be outlawed.
>
> "This is my badge. These are the fines. This is what is hanging over
> your head, and we want you to know that," Crawford says the official
> told him.
>
>
>
>
>                                         Crawford's popular farm may
> seem a curious place for the FDA to move ahead with a long-planned
> federal assault on deadly food poisoning. To Crawford's knowledge, none
> of the kohlrabi, fennel, sugar snap peas or other crops from his New Morning
> Farm have ever sickened anyone. But he is not the only organic grower to
> suddenly discover federal inspectors on his land.
>
> In 2010, after a years-long campaign, food-safety activists persuaded
> Congress to give the FDA authority to regulate farm practices.
>  The next year, an outbreak of food poisoning that killed 33 people who
> ate tainted cantaloupes put pressure on the FDA to be aggressive.
>
> Now, farmers are discovering that the FDA's proposed rules would
> curtail many techniques that are common among organic growers, including
>  spreading house-made fertilizers, tilling cropland with grazing
> animals, and irrigating from open creeks.
>
> Suddenly, from small family operations nestled in the foothills of
> Appalachia to the sophisticated organic-grower networks that serve Los
> Angeles and San Francisco, the farms that celebrity chefs and
> food-conscious consumers jostle to buy from are facing an unexpected
> adversary.
>
> They're fighting back. Even though full enforcement of the rules is
> still years away, they are warning customers that some farms would have
> to close.
>
> "They are going to drive farms out of business," said Dave Runsten, policy
> director for Community Alliance with Family Farmers in Davis, Calif.
>
> "The consumer groups behind this don't understand farming," Runsten
> says. "They talk out of both sides of their mouth. They demand these
> one-size-fits-all regulations, then say, 'I don't want to hurt those
> cute little farmers at the farmers market. I shop at the farmers
> market.' It is frustrating."
>
> Many farmers who take part in the locally grown food movement argue
> that contamination is a problem of industrial-sized farms and that some
> of the practices the FDA might ban actually make consumers safer.
>
> Food safety advocates have urged regulators to hang tough. "We don't
> believe large facilities are the only place where outbreaks are
> happening," said Caroline Smith DeWaal, food safety director at the Center
> for Science in the Public Interest in Washington. Farm-to-fork growers, she
> said, need to accept that emerging strains of E. coli
>  and other bacteria can just as easily seep into the produce sold at a
> farmers market as into the batches of salad bagged at giant processing
> plants, and they need to tweak their methods to protect against it.
>
> "At the end of the day, consumers will be paying a little bit more
> for this. But a few cents here may help avoid a severe illness," Smith
> DeWaal says.
>
> Congress passed the landmark Food Safety Modernization Act amid
> alarming reports from public health agencies about widespread food
> contamination. Tens of millions of consumers are sickened by tainted
> food each year, and some 3,000 die annually as a result, according to the
> Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
>
> Parents of children who died from drinking contaminated juice or
> eating unsafe spinach rallied lawmakers with horrifying stories.
> Concerns about bioterrorism also played a role. The new rules are meant,
>  in part, to make the nation's food supply less susceptible to
> tampering.
>
> The century-old FDA has ample experience breaking up unsafe
> pharmaceutical factories and food processors but is still finding its
> way around family farms. At a recent congressional hearing, Rep. Marsha
> Blackburn (R-Tenn.) seized on one draft set of rules in which the FDA
> declared kale is "never consumed raw."
>
> "I was going to offer to make a kale salad for you," she said to
> Michael Taylor, a deputy commissioner. "It causes you to wonder if those
>  who are writing these rules have ever set foot on a farm."
>
> Over the summer, the owner of the last working farm in Akron, Ohio,
> which had been supplying produce to locals for 117 years, said he was
> throwing in the towel and blamed the FDA's new rules. Don Bessemer
>  told the Akron Beacon Journal that he was up for fighting pests and
> even drought, but not bureaucrats. Thirty workers lost jobs.
>
> Federal regulators have been scrambling to find the right balance
> ever since the draft rules set off controversy. The FDA has backed away
> from some of its positions, and Taylor points out that thousands of the
> smallest farms would be exempt from new inspections under an agreement
> negotiated in Congress.
>
> "This is the first time that the FDA will have regulated produce safety on
> the farm," he said in an interview.
>
> "It is understandable people have concerns and questions," he added. "We
> have learned a lot during this last year."
>
> Regulators have been poring over comments from some 20,000 groups and
>  individuals. On listening tours at farms, they have gotten an earful
> from growers such as Judith Redmond, one of the owners of the 350-acre Full
> Belly Farm
>  in the scenic Capay Valley northwest of Sacramento. Redmond says she is
>  bewildered by proposed restrictions on compost that could make it
> impossible to use on some crops.
>
> "We think they should be encouraging people to use compost," she
> said. "To consider it dangerous or potentially harboring pathogens is
> the wrong message to be sending."
>
> While the FDA is striking a conciliatory tone, protest is sure to
> follow when revised rules emerge this summer. That much is clear just
> from listening to both sides on issues as esoteric as how long farmers
> should be required to leave manure in a compost pile.
>
> Farmers say they simply don't have the facilities to do what food-safety
> groups are demanding.
>
> Crawford, for example, fertilizes his farm with manure made from the
> waste of his 300 chickens. Composting it for as long a period as the
> draft FDA rules require would be impossible, he says.
>
> He worries, too, about rules requiring him to keep animals away from the
> crops.
>
> The Center for Science in the Public Interest will be pushing the FDA not to
> yield.
>
> "Necessity is the mother of invention," Smith DeWaal said. "Why not
> create a cooperative whose sole job it is to truck this stuff to a
> composting facility and truck it back? It's an expense, but way better
> than the unexpected expense of a major recall and implications to your
> farm if an outbreak is traced to your product. There are costs either
> way."
>
> That might make sense to Crawford, the farmer, if he saw convincing
> evidence the manure he is using is dangerous. But he hasn't. What he
> sees is an added expense that will give another reason for farmers
> operating on the margins to call it quits.
>
> "The public loves to love and idealize us little family farmers," he
> said. "But the vast majority of us are hanging by a thread. Now, the
> government is saying, 'We are going to put a lot more weight on that
> thread.'"
>
> evan.halper at latimes.com
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> http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-food-safety-20140223,0,6831660.story#ixzz2ulc0WD3G
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>
> The National Latino Farmers & Ranchers Trade Association
> 717 D Street, NW, Suite 400
> Washington, DC 20004
> 202-628-8833-General
> 202-628-1440-Direct
>
>
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-- 
Eddie Miller, BU '10
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