As a bleeding heart liberal, it pains me to side with the Ron Paul-aggrandizing nut jobs who haunt internet chat rooms and fringe “news” sites, but the farm-related bills and issues currently in front of the US Congress are accidentally evil enough to pry my closet libertarian tendencies into the light.
I’m not nutty enough to subscribe to New World Order conspiracies and, if I were, I wouldn’t suspect Democrats are of the cabal. But this is a situation in which the do-gooder urge to protect people from themselves could end up helping multi-national conglomerates and hurting the little guy. And, of course, Democrats have a long history of cozying up to big agri-business.
Food-related health scares are running rampant these days. In addition to slurping up bovine spongiform encephalopathy in a mad cow burger, there’s the possibility of E coli tucking itself into your spinach or tainting your taco experience. Hoof and mouth disease and avian influenza lurk in the background: media-fueled massacres waiting to happen. Salmonella in the nation’s peanut butter was the last straw. US Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn, along with 39 co-sponsors—well-intentioned Democrats to the last of them—introduced HR 875, the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009.
If all of our food came in cans, jars, foil packs and freezer boxes from the manufacturing plants of major corporations, and if feed lots and monoculture crops were the only source of food, DeLauro’s act would make sense. HR 875 includes regulatory measures and funding aimed at preventing the kind of practices that allowed the Peanut Company of America to put its profit margin in front of its customers’ health by exploiting holes in the permitting and inspection process and relying on inspectors stretched too thin and focused too narrowly. If such large, centralized food processing facilities are going to continue to exist (despite my best efforts to will them out of being), they certainly do require more oversight, regulation and tracking of their products.
However, the Food Safety Modernization Act fails to exempt small-scale, regional-based farmers. The farmers who make CSAs, roadside food stands and farmers markets possible would be subject to the same additional regulations that are being considered for huge corporations. Sounds reasonable on the surface—why not have the same standards across the board?—but small, organic farms have proven safety records that are superior to big agri-business and a much more contained distribution area. Also, small farms can’t afford the burdens of additional facilities, packaging, testing, inspection and tracking. Such operations live and die with their reputations, and they are often in the business of feeding their extended neighbors, so food safety comes about in the old-fashioned way: through ethics.
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http://sfreporter.com/stories/zane_s_world/4530/
