It’s been five years since Congress passed the Food Safety and Modernization Act, which was hailed as the biggest food law in decades. The law languishes in federal agencies awaiting implementation.
Sen. Jon Tester previously amended the FSMA to exempt most small American farmers who sell directly to consumers.
President Barack Obama requested over $100 million in funding from Congress to implement the law by next year, but that’s a tall request given the chilly relationship the two bodies of government enjoy.
Policing a global food industry is no small task and will require more federal workers to inspect the massive agribusiness. The U.S. has just over a thousand inspectors for the nearly 400,000 domestic and foreign facilities that supply food. Compare that to the 6,000 meat facilities that each has an inspector.
Needless to say, modernizing the food business is a massive endeavor.
Rep. Ryan Zinke cosponsored a bill that bans the right of states to label GMO foods and preempts state regulation of bioengineered organisms. The bill quickly passed out of committee in route to a U.S. House floor vote.
This month Obama issued an executive order to modernize how bioengineered foods are approved. The White House ordered that three federal agencies work together to update their internal systems of regulations and streamline the effort to assure the safety biotech foods.
Obama’s order will attempt to work on issues like cloned milk and meat products, gene editing, yet put most procedural focus on food crops that have been engineered to tolerate weed killers.
Earlier this year, Michelle Obama announced new food labels in a fight against obesity. The hope is to revamp the nutrition labels featured on the more than 700,000 food products available throughout the nation.
The Center of Disease Control earlier said that obesity in the 2- to 5-year-old age group had fallen over 40 percent. Given that food-related diseases like heart disease, diabetes and obesity cost the county over $150 billion annually, there is much more work ahead to promote healthier eating.
The recent bird flu that killed a historic 50 million poultry in a matter of months and drove egg prices through the henhouse roof demonstrated that it’s time the feds act aggressively to protect consumers and the industry.
There is much speculation about how the bird flu rapidly spread from state to state but not many mentioned how most poultry are packed into small confined cages during egg production. No amount of antibiotic-laced feed will cure the overcrowding situation, which also plagues the swine industry.
The last Farm Bill refused to stipulate that California’s state law mandating roomier hen cages was illegal, yet lawsuits from Midwestern states were quick to materialize.
The Farm Bill is headed for the next update in the coming years. Perhaps Congress will smarten-up and stop subsidizing crops that contribute to sickness like tobacco, and put more focus onto healthy eating crops produced by American farmers.
If Congress wants to transform the Farm Bill into a food bill, it must focus on crops, which every reasonable nutritionist says a person should eat more of: vegetables and fruits.
Farmers like myself are still awaiting the same big-weather insurance protection offered to farmers who grow crops like sugar or cotton. Chaotic weather is a real problem that affects the nation’s food supply. With record heat and drought, simply sprouting seeds in hot ground can be problematic.
The next Farm Bill should put some research into organic seed and meat development to cope with the hotter planet, invest in technology like drip irrigation and planters’ paper, and continue the advancements that puts public infrastructure into communities to help move local foods from farm to consumer.