Ask Congress to remember small producers in the Food Safety bill!

-- Deadline Passed, See S.510 Action Alert --

Last month we issued an action alert on HR 2749, the Food Safety Enhancement Act of 2009, asking you to tell your representatives that "one size does not fit all when it comes to food safety legislation." Since then, the bill was voted unanimously out of the House Energy and Commerce Committee (on which Oregon's Congressman Walden sits), amended by the House Agriculture Committee (including Oregon's Congressman Schrader), and came up for a fast-track vote today under "suspension of the rules" procedure where it failed to muster the 2/3 majority required (the vote was 280-150).

However, the bill is not dead and can be expected to reappear soon under regular procedure and debate. As it stands, the bill does not make enough distinction between the differing needs and food safety requirements for small producers and industrial scale agribusinesses. Congressman Blumenauer was the only Oregon Representative to vote nay, which suggests we need to do more to educate our Representatives about the potential ramifications of this bill for small producers.

Please contact Representative Blumenauer and thank him for his vote. Also contact Oregon's other Representatives to express your disappointment with their votes and ask them to work to include language in HR 2749 that makes the distinction between small producers and industrial scale agribusinesses. (Find more background information below.)

To contact them by telephone, call the Capitol Switchboard and ask to be directly connected to your Representative's office: 202-224-3121

For mail click here to find the correct address.

For email use the following links:
David Wu (1st district)
Greg Walden (2nd district)
Earl Blumenauer (3rd district)
Peter DeFazio (4th district)
Kurt Schrader (5th district)

(If you're not sure who your Representative is or if you live outside Oregon, click here.)

Sample message:

"I am a constituent of Representative ___________  and I am calling to express my disappointment in his vote to suspend the rules and pass HR 2749, the Food Safety Enhancement Act. When the bill is reconsidered, I'd like him to not only support the Kaptur-Farr amendments, but to go beyond these by urging language that exempts small farms and direct market producers from burdensome and prohibitive registration, record keeping, and HACCP-modeled regulatory systems for small local foods processing enterprises. Recent food safety scares have all originated from big agribusinesses, not small farms which have food safety considerations built into the local networks in which they sell. I am asking him to vote against HR 2749 unless these proposals are included in the final bill."  

Further Information:

As Wild Farm Alliance reports, Kaptur and Farr (et al.) are sponsoring a set of amendments that begin to address some of the shortcomings of the original bill:

• Directing the FDA to ensure new produce standards focus on the highest-risk problems in the fresh produce sector;
• Protecting wildlife and biodiversity by emphasizing animals of significant risk as FDA develops produce standards;
• Expanding the direct marketing exemption so that farmers selling directly to school cafeterias and other institutions or whose farm identity is preserved on products all the way to the consumer, are not required to establish an expensive tracing system;
• Ensuring that new food safety regulations are consistent and coordinated with the federal organic standard administered by the USDA National Organic Program (NOP) which already has traceability and other measures that support food safety;
• Establishing a sliding scale for facility registration for farms that qualify as 'facilities' based on their on-farm processing activities so that small and mid-sized family farmers are not forced to pay the same fee as multinational companies.
• Requiring farmers to maintain paper records of farm sales receipts to the first buyer of the product rather than electronic records of all sales through the entire food supply chain.

However, Oregon Rural Action and the WORC network remain concerned that:

• FDA-imposed minimum standards for direct market farmers may not have been removed;
• Kaptur and Farr amendments set up a sliding scale for food processors, so the vast majority of small processing facilities are subsidizing the handful of mega-processors, who will all pay $500 each under the current rendering of the bill;
• Although caveats to the produce standards have been added along with more language to try to hold FDA accountable, small farms or direct market farms are still not exempted;
• As written, HR 2749 sets up burdensome and prohibitive registration, record keeping, and HACCP-modeled regulatory system for small local foods processing enterprises.

Read our first HR 2749 action alert for additional information.

Please contact your Representatives today!