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  • From: Road's End Farm <organic87 AT frontiernet.net>
  • To: Market Farming <market-farming AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Market-farming] GAP
  • Date: Wed, 3 Mar 2010 12:49:24 -0500


On Mar 3, 2010, at 11:43 AM, William H Shoemaker wrote:

Just a reminder, GAP is not law. Even though USDA has drawn up a GAP program, it does not have legal enforcement. Though give a lawyer an inch,….

There were definitely Federal people at the FDA meeting talking about eventually producing mandatory standards.

To give them some credit, they were also pointing out a lot of problems in current GAP programs.

 
HOWEVER, this is a model that responds to very real consumer concerns about food safety. You can gripe about the media or the science behind food safety all you want. But if your customers want some assurance that someone other than you says your food is safe, GAP is a good tool. Yes, it takes paper work and time to comply. But when you’re done, you can demonstrate that you made every effort to produce safe food. 

I have taken a fast look at the self-assessment on the Cornell site, and will take a better look at it later. But much of the paperwork is designed for large operations with large work crews and frequent turnover, and makes no sense whatsoever on small operations. Am I supposed to plaster the house bathroom with signs? Am I seriously supposed to a) tell my one worker, every day, how to wash his hands and b) write down, every day, that I have done so? (If that were the only thing required to be written down every day, or several times a day, this would only be silly. But I'd almost have to hire a second person to do nothing but follow the two of us around writing down things.)

This is not to say that some portions of it aren't useful; reading through and considering the issues is a good idea. Although the huge outbreaks that hit the papers aren't coming from small direct marketers, it's perfectly possible for careless handling to cause people to get sick from small farm produce; we do need to use reasonable caution.

 
I’m very worried that this could hurt a lot of small market farmers who are already doing a good job but the “standards” will start creating questions in consumers’ minds. It could have a big impact on organic agriculture, which already has enemies that would love to see it disappear.

After the standard food industry ran away with much of the meaning of the word "organic", many of us switched to emphasizing "locally grown". I figured it would be a lot harder to steal that one. Well, the national and multinational scale operations can't, indeed, steal "locally grown" very effectively. I'm starting to think they're trying to use this technique to kill it, though.

USDA and FDA do in fact show some signs of listening to us. We need to stay wide awake on this one, and make sure that they get lots of sensible info from us to listen to (not incoherent ranting, and not statements of easily debunked claims -- just to be clear, I haven't been seeing those in this discussion; but have had some pop into my email box from elsewhere).

-- Rivka; Finger Lakes NY, Zone 5 mostly
Fresh-market organic produce, small scale






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