For those of you who are unaware of S.510 it is also known as the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act. It is the companion to H.R. 2749 or the Food Safety Enhancement Act passed by the House last July. One important difference in the Senate bill is the Tester amendment which would exempt small farms from regulations aimed at large-scale agriculture. This is my second diary on the subject. The first covered the role of the Tester amendment and the impact of the bill on small farms.
Both the House and Senate bills would amend the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FFDCA) to expand the authority of the Secretary of Health and Human Services to regulate food, including by authorizing the Secretary to suspend the registration of a food facility. The bill would go a long way towards uniting the FDA and the USDA in their efforts to regulate food in this country. As it stands the different agencies regulate different spheres of the food and agricultural industries. The separation often makes little sense.
Many groups oppose the bill without several proposed amendments that would exempt small businesses from the new regulations. Then again some just oppose the bill because they do not see the need for more regulation. I think it is a mistake to oppose the bill outright. The concept behind the bill is accountability for the product. Small scale producers are much closer to their consumers and are, therefore, more accountable for causing food-borne illnesses. Large-scale producers on the other hand are separated from their end consumers by several steps: the shipper, the grocer, the restauranteur, etc. The goal of this bill is to better regulate those businesses and make them more accountable for causing food-borne illnesses such as E coli, salmonella, and Norwalk virus to name but a few.
Food Safety News recently interviewed National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition Policy Director Ferd Hoefner about the bill.
On Senator Sherrod Brown's (D-OH) amendment to the traceability and recordkeeping section of the bill.
A: Senator Sherrod Brown's office has been working on an amendment to ensure FDA full and speedy traceability in the case of a food safety emergency. The National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition has worked with the Senator's office to craft language that would not reduce FDA's ability to identify the source of contaminated food but would recognize the different ways that food moves in the US food system.
On Senator John Tester's (D-MT) amendment, which would exempt food facilities with under $500,000 gross sales from preventative control plan requirements, and traceback and recordkeeping provisions.
A: The current FDA regulations in our view make little sense. All farms that would otherwise be declared food facilities by FDA because of specific normal farming activities or on-farm value-adding processing activities are currently exempt from all requirements on all of their production if more than 50 percent of their gross sales are direct sales to consumers... In a word, the current regulation is impractical and perhaps also illogical. The Tester approach is a great improvement over the current situation and in our view could be further improved to make it even more practical.
The other new movement on the bill is the possibility of banning BPA as also addressed by Food Safety news. An amendment proposed by Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) to ban the use of bisphenol-A in food and drink containers is threatening to break up the broad, bipartisan coalition backing of the bill. Both the Grocery Manufacturers of America (GMA), and the Chamber of Commerce, two major business groups who currently support S. 510, recently threatened to oppose the bill if it contained language banning the controversial chemical. It is not yet certain if Feinstein's language will make it into the manager's package. The manager's package is the group of amendments that both parties agree upon before the bill comes to the floor.
The bill was supposed to go to the Senate floor two weeks ago but was sidelined for other legislation, specifically financial reform which might be sidelined itself for immigration reform. It is my firm belief that the Senate can multi-task. The House has already passed it's version of the bill. Excluding the new Feinstein amendment there is bipartisan support for S.510. This bill needs to be brought to the Senate floor and receive a vote. Food safety is too important an issue to be sidelined for much longer.
There will inevitably be more amendments offered to this bill the longer it sits unattended. While I agree with Senator Feinstein that BPA needs to be addressed I do not believe that it needs to be addressed in this bill. There are a lot of problems with the regulation of food products in this country. This bill, with the Tester amendment, goes a long way towards fixing those problems. The issue of BPA is a packaging issue and, therefore, has no place in S.510. This is especially true if that issue will derail the entire bill.