[NAFEX] Fwd: Senate Food Safety Alert - Please Forward
Road's End Farm
organic87 at frontiernet.net
Fri Aug 13 19:41:26 EDT 2010
Sorry for cross posting, I'm on two or three lists that should see
this --
Haven't had time to study it yet myself, we have a market tomorrow
morning.
-- Rivka; Finger Lakes NY, Zone 5 mostly
Fresh-market organic produce, small scale
Begin forwarded message:
> From: "Annette Higby, National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition"
> Date: August 13, 2010 6:06:19 PM EDT
> Subject: Senate Food Safety Alert - Please Forward
> Reply-To: annette at sustainableagriculture dot net
> Senate Food Safety Legislation
> Information Alert
> August 13, 2010
>
> The Food Safety Modernization Act (S 510) was reported out of the
> Senate Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee in November of
> last year. The bill as reported out of committee would ramp up FDA
> regulation on farms that even minimally process their crops and sell
> them to restaurants, food coops, groceries, schools and wholesalers.
>
> Yesterday, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP)
> Committee released a copy of the "manager's amendment" to the FDA
> Food Safety Modernization Act (S. 510). These amendments have the
> support of HELP Chairman Tom Harkin (D-IA) and Ranking Member Mike
> Enzi (R-WY) as well as the four lead sponsors of the underlying
> bill, Dick Durbin (D-IL), Judd Gregg (R-NH), Chris Dodd (D-CT), and
> Richard Burr (R-NC) and will be adopted if and when the bill comes
> to the Senate floor in September when Congress returns from its
> summer recess. The full manager's package is available here.
>
> In releasing the new version of the bill, Senator Harkin said, "For
> far too long, the headlines have told the story of why this measure
> is so urgently needed: foodborne illness outbreaks, product recalls
> and Americans sickened over the food they eat. This 100-year-old
> plus food safety structure needed to be modernized."
>
> Most sustainable agriculture and family farm groups think the Senate
> bill with the manager's amendment is a very significant improvement
> over the companion bill passed by the House of Representatives (HR
> 2749) last year. NSAC has been able to help make substantial
> improvements in the Senate bill through the HELP markup and in
> changes that will be adopted as part of the manager's amendment when
> the bill comes to the Senate floor. If the Tester amendment (see
> below) can be worked out and agreed to before Senate floor action,
> we will be able to support the Senate bill. However, we strongly
> oppose the companion House measure, and stand ready to defend the
> Senate bill in conference with the House should that prove necessary.
>
> The Managers package includes the following important improvements
> to the bill as reported out of committee last year:
>
> * The amendment sponsored by Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT)
> pertaining to farms that engage in value-added processing or that co-
> mingle product from several farms. It will provide the Food and Drug
> Administration (FDA) with the authority to either exempt farms
> engaged in low or no risk processing or co-mingling activities from
> new regulatory requirements or to modify particular regulatory
> requirements for such farming operations. Included within the
> purview of the amendment are exemptions or flexibilities with
> respect to requirements within S. 510 for expensive food safety
> preventative control plans and FDA on-farm inspections.
>
> * The amendments sponsored by Senator Michael Bennet (D-CO) to
> reduce unnecessary paperwork and excess regulation. The Bennet
> language pertains to both the preventative control plan and the
> produce standards sections of the bill. FDA is instructed to provide
> flexibility for small processors including on-farm processing, to
> minimize the burden of compliance with regulations, and to minimize
> the number of different standards that apply to separate foods. FDA
> will also be prohibited from requiring farms and other food
> facilities to hire consultants to write food safety plans or to
> identify, implement, certify or audit those plans. With respect to
> produce standards, FDA will also be given the discretion to develop
> rules for categories of foods or for mixtures of foods rather than
> necessarily needing to have a separate rule for each specific
> commodity or to regulate specific crops if the real food safety
> issue involved mixtures only.
>
> * The amendment sponsored by Senator Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) to
> provide for a USDA-delivered competitive grants program for food
> safety training for farmers, small processors and wholesalers. The
> training projects will prioritize small and mid-scale farms,
> beginning and socially disadvantaged farmers, and small food
> processors and wholesalers. The program will be administered by
> USDA's National Institute for Food and Agriculture. As is the case
> for all of the provisions in S. 510, funding for the bill and for
> this competitive grants program will happen through the annual
> agriculture appropriations bill process.
>
> * The effort championed by Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) to strip the
> bill of wildlife-threatening enforcement against "animal
> encroachment" of farms is also in the manager's package. It will
> require FDA to apply sound science to any requirements that might
> impact wildlife and wildlife habitat on farms.
>
> * An amendment proposed by Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH) to amend the
> traceability and recordkeeping section of the bill that will exempt
> food that is direct marketed from farmers to consumers or to grocery
> stores and exempt food that has labeling that preserves the identity
> of the farm that produced the food. The amendment also prevents FDA
> from requiring any farm from needing to keep records beyond the
> first point of sale when the product leaves the farm, except in the
> case of farms that co-mingle product from multiple farms, in which
> case they must also keep records one step back as well as one step
> forward.
>
> Not in the package but still under serious negotiation for inclusion
> in the bill when it reaches the floor of the Senate is an amendment
> by Senator John Tester (D-MT) to exempt food facilities with under a
> certain annual gross sales threshold from preventative control plan
> requirements and to exempt farmers who primarily direct market
> product to consumers, stores or restaurants from the bill's produce
> standards regulations. Our expectation is this amendment will be
> successfully negotiated over the coming weeks and will be accepted
> as part of the final bill once the bill reaches the Senate floor.
>
>
> We also continue to note and emphasize the additional provisions
> NSAC helped secure when the bill was marked up in Committee last
> year. Those changes included:
>
> * requiring FDA and USDA coordination (including with respect to
> organic farming);
>
> * limiting recordkeeping for farmers to just the initial sale to the
> first purchaser of the crop; and
>
> * language in the produce section directing FDA to create rules that
> are appropriate to the scale and diversity of the farm, that take
> into consideration conservation and environmental standards
> established by other federal agencies, that do not conflict with
> organic certification standards, and that prioritize high risk crops.
>
> Still pending is an amendment from Senator Feinstein (D-CA) banning
> the use of Bisphenol A (BPA) in all food and beverage containers.
> The Grocery Manufacturers Association and other industry groups have
> come out strongly against the measure. Negotiations are ongoing to
> work out compromise language, but it is unclear to us what the
> status is of those talks.
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/private/nafex/attachments/20100813/2bd0c27d/attachment.html
More information about the nafex
mailing list