Congress may vote on HR 2749, The Food Safety Enhancement Act of 2009, as early as this week. Equal Exchange, a member of the National Organic Coalition, has been working hard with other allies to make amendments to the bill before it is voted upon in Congress this week. Although many pieces of the legislation have been improved through this process, there are still concerns.
In particular, the bill includes a $500 annual inspection fee for all farmers that do processing on their farms. This means that large corporate farms (that have a far greater impact on consumer food safety) and small family farms will be responsible for paying the same inspection fee. We are particularly worried that charging all producers a $500 fee, regardless of their impact on food safety concerns, their size, or the nature of their processing, will place an undue hardship on many of the small coffee farmers with whom we work.
Many farmers have a small depulper on their farm which is used to take the pulp off the coffee cherry after it has been picked. The coffee is then fermented, washed and dried before it is sent to a dry mill to have the final layer of chaff removed prior to export. It is unclear whether these farmers will be subject to this processing fee, but there is no doubt that many small-scale coffee farmers in Latin America, Asia, and Africa will not be able to afford this additional expense. (Many small coffee farmers make less than $1000 year and as it is they already must pay the costs of organic certification, Fair Trade certification, and any other additional certifications that their co-op uses. )
Below is a press release from the Rocky Mountain Farmers Union which discusses some of the concerns about the current version of the Food Safety Bill and further information taken from materials written by Brian Snyder, Executive Director of PASA. We are asking for people to call their representatives today and tomorrow to urge them not to pass a Food Safety bill which will adversely impact organic agriculture and small farmers.
Thanks for your concern.
Press Release
For Immediate Release: July 23, 2009
Further Information: Mick McAllister (303.283.3537)
Congress About to Hand Over “Food Safety” to Agri-business
Concerned by the sudden rush to pass the Food Safety bill (HR 2749), Rocky Mountain Farmers Union President Kent Peppler sent a message to the congressional delegation from Colorado, New Mexico, and Wyoming: “Now just a dang minute!”
Although the bill was improved by amendments before reaching the House floor, it is still, as Peppler testified in Washington last week, potentially devastating for small farmers and ranchers.
The letter points out that “The bill treats the family who cans their neighbors’ peaches in Montrose as if they posed the same food safety risk as a corporate dogfood maker importing melamine-laced wheat gluten from China. That,” Peppler concludes, “is ridiculous.”
As written, the bill simply taxes the small farmer to subsidize corporate agriculture. A farm family that cans their neighbor’s peaches will be required to create a plan for ‘scientific’ maintenance of food safety and pay a $500 annual fee to cover inspection costs. “That family, making $5,000/year of supplemental income by canning peaches, will pay a fee of $500 to cover FDA ‘inspections.’ That $500 fee will also ‘cover’ inspections of plants turning out a hundred tons of canned beans a day. Does anyone seriously believe that it will cost $500 to inspect a family farm? Or that $500 will even begin to cover the cost of inspecting that industrial plant?”
“Set aside the attack on the slim profits of organic and natural food growers and local producers with small, diversified operations,” Peppler commented. “On top of that, the bill allows the FDA to require food growers to follow ‘scientific’ methods. Agriculture has spent half a century trying to get out from under the monoculture, petroleum-guzzling ‘science’ forced on us by corporate monopolies. No thanks.”
The letter to the congressional delegation concludes, “The very companies that created the problem, a problem the farmer and the consumer have been demanding solutions to for more than a century, will be coddled, subsidized, and given yet another advantage over the local, sustainable, natural food competing with them in the marketplace.”
“We need to hit the switchboards in Washington and get Congress to give this bill a closer look,” Peppler said.
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Message: Please call your Representative’s office and encourage them to support HR 2749 ONLY if the ideas included in the proposed Farr/Kaptur letter are included in the final bill.
The following information comes from Brian Snyder, Executive Director of PASA Farming.
While the bill has improved considerably from its original wording, it is disappointing that the fee being assessed to farms will be the same, regardless of the size and scale of the operation, rather than a sliding scale for smaller operations, including a minimum size below which no fee would be charged. We believe that the largest food processing companies, from which most food safety issues arise, should be responsible for paying higher fees. Certainly large corporate farms can afford to pay more.
Other language that the National Organic Coalition would like to see in the bill 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 the Energy and Commerce Committee must deal with if they expect to get their two-thirds vote to limit debate.
So, please take a few minutes out of your day today or tomorrow to help advance the sustainable farming agenda with respect to food safety. Call your representatives 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
Phone Listing
As usual, we are greatly outnumbered and outsized ($$) by groups that would rather see sustainable farmers pay the price of food system abuses that have originated elsewhere.
Thanks again for your care and attention to this important matter.
Small Farmers. Big Change. 
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