Food Safety Bill Will Likely Pass Today

If you read food politics blogs voraciously, the way I do, you know that HR2749 (otherwise known as the Food Safety Enhancement Act of 2009) fell six votes short of passing in the House yesterday. You also know that this bill, which will likely pass today,* would give the FDA more authority and more teeth, allowing the agency to issue recalls (which, weirdly, it doesn’t have the power to do now, resulting in E.coli-contaminated cookie dough still  languishing on shelves days after Nestlé’s “voluntary recall”), requiring the agency to trace food-borne illness by tagging products, improving inspections of imported food, and giving FDA inspectors the power to demand access to a company’s safety records.

This all sounds good to me. Considering how many Americans—many of them children—are sickened by food-borne pathogens in this country every year, and considering how frequently our industrial food system  efficiently spreads pathogens (see: cookie dough, peanut butter, and organic spinach) like an uncontainable virus, this legislation couldn’t come a moment too soon.

So why are some Representatives and Senators—not to mention small farmers and the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC)—against the bill?

At issue is a $500 monthly fee that would unfairly burden small family farmers. As the NSAC says in its press release:

Among other shortcomings, the bill retains a flat registration fee of $500 per facility that will disproportionately impact small-scale producers who have invested in on-farm value-added processing to meet growing consumer demand and retain a higher share of the food dollar. The same fee would be charged whether the facility was run by a farm family with few if any employees or a multinational corporation with hundreds or thousands of employees.

Some groups worry that the FDA will have too much power—that they will dictate “best practices” in regional agriculture, thereby determining how farmers can and can’t grow their produce. Also, some legislators feel as though the discussions have been truncated and rushed.

There is more to it than this, of course. Let’s hope today’s continued discussion on the floor of the House goes well and that the needed amendments get added (specifying a sliding scale fee depending on the size of the producer, perhaps?) so we can be well on our way to tougher food safety standards in this country.

If you’re online right now, follow Obamafoodorama on Twitter as the House wraps up their discussion this evening.

*For some reason, the vote required a 2/3 majority in the House yesterday but today it will only need a simple majority. If someone can explain that to me, please do!