The other day I was emailed about a situation brewing in Washington, several members of Congress are trying to push through a bill that will make the administration end of farming so difficult that only the largest of distributors could afford to run such operations. This is, of course, all being done in the name of health and human safety. In the article, “Lose your property for growing food?” by Chelsea Schilling, two pieces of legislation are actually in the works right now. The first one is called “H.R. 875: Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009” and it mainly deals with not only establishing a new agency of government (which means more money wasted in this hard economic time), but also takes a try at implementing extensive food growth and control protocols that are so heavy handed it almost begs the question why we don’t just have the government itself grow our food for us. There is a difference between monitoring and micro-managing and this measure would ensure the latter of the two.
The second one is called “S. 425: Food Safety and Tracking Improvement Act” which attempts to establish an extensive online database designed to track food from the moment it starts growing all the way up until it enters your digestive tract. It not only does that but also sets up the authority to force the recall of food which is currently done only on an advisory approach but is ultimately up to the manufacturer and/or distributor.
Now in principle these ideas don’t seem so bad, that is until you stop to think what this actually does on the larger scale. In order to implement such changes the farmers themselves will have to buy new computer equipment and learn to use it. The farmer will have to follow much stricter guidelines that even tell him what fertilizer to use, the minimum amount to use (say goodbye to organic farmers), harvesting, sorting, and storage operations, nutrients, hygiene, packaging, temperature controls, animal encroachment, and water. All this is actually taken from the wording of the legislation itself. This means essentially the farmer has no real control of his farm. He just does what he is told. It seems to just stop short of telling them what they can grow.
Essentially all this means an end to organic produce and farming as well as farmers markets because the small time farmers simply can’t afford to comply with the regulations. What is the point of these things anyway? We don’t have problems with people dying left and right from poor quality food. When a product does have problems it doesn’t last long once consumers catch wind of it, so market forces essentially kill poor products. The only thing that has actually hit news as of recent related to food problems is salmonella, a bacteria that grows absolutely everywhere, coming up in testing here and there. When that happens the production of the product is halted and the bacteria is eliminated. Plus anyone that actually cooks their food and washes their hands properly won’t have any problems.
There is no real need for any of this. It is simply over-regulation. So I decided to look a little closer and the involved politicians are heavily connected to companies that would profit greatly from the passing of this bill. To make matters worse, by killing off the small time farmers it means less competition for the bigger fish and an easier time raising food prices and increasing profit margins. This matter isn’t about public safety, it is about greedy politicians and companies trying to line their pockets.
To top all of this off I found another article, “Commodities down but food prices lag” By Lisa Baertlein and Ted Kerr at Reuters, talking about how the cost of producing processed food has gone down since their component prices have significantly dropped, yet the consumers are not seeing any price drops at all. It seems like everyone in the industry is trying to take more and more away from consumers and these companies wonder why the economy is suffering.
-Pjerky
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Tags: Congress, Consumer Rights, crops, farming, food, food industry, genetic research, Human Rights, legalese, organic, organic farming, processed food
