Please take a moment to read the letter below from Brian Snyder, Executive Director of the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture.  It concerns HR 2749, the Food Safety Enhancement Act, which could move on the floor of the House with limited debate and no amendments as early as today and certainly by early next week.

In brief, this is a bill intended to make improvements to the nation’s food safety system.  It is in some ways encouraging that the government is paying attention to problems in food production.  But we and many other are concerned that the bill favors large scale conventional agriculture and threatens small farmers and food producers — and thus the local foods movement as a whole.  We think it would be better to support more positive, sustainable models of food production than to simply increase regulation across the board.

PASA and other advocates of small farms and local foods have been working very closely with Congressional staffers on this bill, and have secured important exemptions for small farms and fishermen doing direct marketing.  But there are still some major concerns about the content and language of the bill, which PASA’s Snyder articulates plainly in the letter below.  Please take a moment to read it and, if you feel moved, to contact your Representatives today.

Thanks for taking to the time to read this.  We promise to keep policy issues to a minimum on our website, and instead to focus on telling this wonderful tale of food and community.  We can’t imagine doing anything else.

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From: Brian Snyder, Executive Director, PASA

Dear friends,

I’m going to make this as succinct as possible, while also giving you enough background to understand what’s going on.  In brief, the Food Safety bill in the House of Representatives (HR 2749) is expected to move as early as tomorrow (if no bumps in the road), but certainly by early next week. The goal of the Energy and Commerce Committee (E&C) is to move this bill under “suspension,” meaning with limited debate and no amendments, which requires a two-thirds vote, and to do so before the August recess starts in two weeks.  Delay of healthcare legislation at this point means they will try to move forward on food safety first, aggressively and somewhat undercover of the healthcare debate.

PASA has been centrally involved in consulting with E&C on this legislation since March, along with our friends at MOFGA (Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Assoc.), NSAC (National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition) and others across the country.  Last week, PASA farmer member Nick Maravell (Potomac, Maryland) testified in a hearing on the bill before the House Ag Committee and did an incredible job of raising the most important outstanding issues.

To date we have achieved some things we can be proud of, including exemption for direct marketers from most traceability requirements (including for sales to restaurants and grocery stores), and now including some clear language in the bill to define what on-farm processing activities might be exempt from FDA registration as well.  Things are still in flux as I write, but we believe all such processing will be exempt as long as 50% or more of sales (including by Internet and mail order) are made directly to individuals (i.e. retail, as opposed to wholesale). And a huge gain just this week will likely be another exemption on sales of feedstuffs for livestock from one farmer to another, which had been included in the Bioterrorism Act of 2002 (thaaat’s right…) as an activity requiring registration.  There have been other gains in specific wording of the bill, too detailed to enumerate in this email right now.

But we’re still disappointed that the fee being assessed to eligible businesses, including some on farms, will be the flat rate of $500 instead of our preferred sliding scale for smaller operations, including a minimum size below which no fee would be charged.  We in fact would prefer to see a much higher fee paid by the largest food processing companies, from which most food safety issues seem to emanate in any case — but that may not be achievable at this point. We also have other language we’d like to see in the bill that would focus attention on high risk aspects of food production, protect organic farmers from duplicative paperwork and expand the research agenda into more diversified systems.  All of these concerns are contained in an amendment being sponsored by Representatives Farr, Kaptur and others that E&C must deal with if they expect to get their two-thirds vote to limit debate.

So, we’re asking ALL of you to take a little time out of your busy summer schedules to help advance the sustainable farming agenda with respect to food safety even more than what we’ve been able to on our own.  Call your representatives, and maybe a few others, and express strong support for the exemptions now contained in HR 2749 for direct marketing, and ask them to support the Farr-Kaptur Amendment that would do even more to focus food safety efforts on the REAL problem areas. To be clear, they will need to insist that language of the amendment get into the bill before it is introduced on the floor. Also, let them know what you think of a system that would charge a small on-farm processing operation the same fee as facilities operated by the largest food companies in the world!  Following are links where you can find contact info for members of the House of Representatives:

Find your Rep: http://www.house.gov/house/MemberWWW_by_State.shtml

Phone listing: http://clerk.house.gov/member_info/mcapdir.html

This has already been a long slog, and if this bill passes we’ll now have to begin working with the Senate, and then a likely Conference Committee, to make further improvements.  As usual, we are greatly outnumbered and outsized ($$) by groups that would rather see sustainable farmers pay the price of food system sins that have originated elsewhere.  But we’ve been here before, and prevailed.  A few minutes of your time today could make sure that common sense wins out again!

Thanks for your care and attention to this important matter.

Brian Snyder
Executive Director, PASA
brian@pasafarming.org