Forwarded Message:
An Action Alert from the
Organic Farming Research Foundation, 303 Potrero St. #29-203, Santa Cruz, CA 95060
tel. 831-426-6606, action@ofrf.org, www.ofrf.org.


Call Your US Representative Today - Urge Him or Her to Support the Kaptur-Farr Food Safety Proposal

There is no question: our food system needs to be safer. But Congress is currently debating food safety legislation (Food Safety Enhancement Act - H.R. 2749) that could compromise small and mid-sized organic family farmers. If approved, certain provisions could hinder organic, beginning, and sustainable farmers’ access to markets, require expensive fees, and lead to the dismantling of important conservation practices and wildlife habitat.

Representatives Marcy Kaptur (OH-9), Sam Farr (CA-17), Maurice Hinchey (NY-22), Jesse Jackson Jr. (IL-2), Peter Welch (VT-at large), Chellie Pingree (ME-1) and Earl Blumenauer (OR-3) submitted a letter to the House Energy and Commerce Committee with specific proposed changes to HR 2749 that addresses many of the concerns raised by the sustainable and organic agriculture community.

HR 2749 will go before the full House of Representatives early this week! It is important that you call your representative today and ask him or her to join the effort to protect small and mid-sized organic and sustainable family farmers, the environment, and consumer choice by supporting the complete Kaptur-Farr proposal. (To find out who represents you, visit congressmerge.com.) Please see the background section below for more information.

Please Call Your Representative Today.

Please call your representative ’s office and ask to speak with the aide that works on agriculture. To find out who represents you, visit congressmerge.com.

Message: “I am a constituent of Representative ______ and I am calling to ask (him/her) to support the Kaptur-Farr proposal for HR 2749, the Food Safety Enhancement Act of 2009. I am asking (him/her) to vote against HR 2749 unless all of the proposals included in the Kaptur-Farr letter are included.”

Note: If you are in Representatives Farr's or Kaptur's districts, or your Representative is one of those who supported the Kaptur-Farr Food Safety proposal, please call and thank them.

Background
On June 17, the House Energy and Commerce Committee approved HR 2749, the Food Safety Enhancement Act of 2009. This bill is the culmination of several food safety bills that had been under discussion since the beginning of the year, many of which would have imposed draconian regulations on small scale farmers. HR 2749 did incorporate some changes proposed by the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (of which OFRF is a member). However, this bill still contains several provisions that could be very harmful to small scale organic and sustainable farmers if they are included in the final law.

HR 2749 fails to provide guidance so that new food safety standards are harmonized with those specified in the Organic Foods Production Act. This means that organic farmers, already subject to a rigorous standard and certification process that takes into account food safety concerns, would have to undergo additional and possibly repetitive costly inspections. The bill also does not specify the positive role that on-farm conservation practices can play to address food safety concerns, such as installing windrows to cut down on dust and airborne pathogenic organisms. In addition, HR 2749 requires food processing facilities to register annually with the FDA and pay a flat $500 registration fee per facility, regardless of size or income. This means that a small processor (even farmers doing on-farm value-added processing if selling mostly wholesale) would pay the same annual fee as a facility run by Tyson, ADM, or any other large food manufacturer. Finally, HR 2749 requires farms to do extensive and expensive electronic tracing even if they only sell their own unprocessed products in the wholesale market.

The bill is expected to go to the House floor for a vote on Tuesday, July 28 or Wednesday, July 29.

The Kaptur-Farr proposal addresses many of the concerns that the sustainable and organic agriculture community has with HR 2749, by:

·                             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;

·                             Protecting wildlife and biodiversity by emphasizing "animals of significant risk" as FDA develops produce standards;

·                             Directing the FDA to ensure new produce standards focus on the highest-risk problems in the fresh produce sector;

·                             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;

·                             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.

More Information
 The “Dear Colleague” letter circulated by Representatives Kaptur and Farr to House Members.

The full text of HR 2749

“Brasher: Food-safety bill meets objections from groups” – Des Moines Register, July 26, 2009

“Food Safety Enhancement Act draws ire” – S.F. Chronicle, July 17, 2009

This message originated from or was forwarded by:
Chrys Ostrander
Chrysalis Farm @ Tolstoy
Organic Micro-permaculture
33495 Mill Canyon Rd.
Davenport, WA 99122
509-725-0610
chrys@thefutureisorganic.net
http://www.thefutureisorganic.net

"From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs"
Louis Jean Joseph Charles Blanc - "The organization of work" 1839
Karl Marx - "Critique of the Gotha Program" 1875

"The purpose of agriculture is not the production of food, but the perfection of human beings"
Masanobu Fukuoka (February 2, 1913 - August 16, 2008)  - "One Straw Revolution" 1978

"The community whose every member possesses the art of deriving a comfortable subsistence from the smallest area of soil... will be alike independent of crowned-kings, money-kings, and land-kings...."
Abraham Lincoln: Address to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 1859

"We will never have an organic future and a stable climate until we pull all the troops out of Iraq
and redirect our annual $650 billion military budget to greening the economy and guaranteeing
a sustainable environment and economic justice for everyone."
Ronnie Cummins, National Director, Organic Consumers Association
at the "Farms Not Arms" public forum and protest in Manhattan, September, 2007