Food Safety Act Is A Rotten Apple
As we move into the last couple of months of the midterm election season, things are looking up for Republicans all across the board. According to a recent CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey, the GOP leads the Democrats by 7 points on the “generic ballot” question, 52 percent to 45 percent. That 7-point advantage is up from a 3-point margin last month. And Republicans lead by 51 percent to 41 percent among registered voters in Gallup’s weekly tracking of 2010 congressional voting preferences. The 10-percentage-point lead is the GOP’s largest so far this year and is its largest in Gallup’s history of tracking the midterm generic ballot for Congress.
Much of this momentum, which seems to be accelerating as we close in on Election Day, comes from a growing distaste for top-down government solutions to problems many say were caused by too much government intervention in the first place. Several candidates for national office this year, such as Kentucky’s Rand Paul, Utah’s Mike Lee, and Nevada’s Sharron Angle, have gained widespread attention for their calls to shrink government at all levels and to cite the constitutionality of legislation before voting on it. If the GOP scores big electoral victories this year, there is no question that it will be due to a desire of the electorate to return to a more limited, bottom-up form of government.
With that being said, one has to wonder just what Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) is thinking with his sponsorship of S. 510, the Food Safety Modernization Act.
First elected in 2004, Burr’s small-government credentials have always been shaky. The most obvious example of this ambivalence was his support of 2008’s bank bailout, otherwise known as TARP. However, there are several other examples. Burr voted for No Child Left Behind, which is widely acknowledged to have succeeded only at making the jobs of educators more difficult and restricted while not doing much of anything to increase the quality of education for public school students. He also voted to continue the Bush Administration’s warrant-less wiretapping policy, a clear violation of the Fourth Amendment’s protections against searches, seizures, and arrests not judicially sanctioned as a result of probable cause. Burr enabled the outrageous deficit spending of the Bush Administration, the most fiscally irresponsible in American history (until it was eclipsed by the current White House occupant), and finally, sat silent while President Bush routinely marginalized Congress through the use of Executive Orders and presidential signing statements, simply refusing to enforce legislation duly passed by Congress with which he did not agree.
Given that record and the current mood of the electorate, one would think that Burr would be eager to distance himself from any legislation which imposes top-down solutions from Washington, but that simply isn’t the case. The Food Safety Modernization Act is a bill that has been pending for a couple of years in various forms. There have been several amendments made recently, but the general consensus is that it still imposes an increased regulatory burden on small-scale local farms while decreasing the inspection burden on industrial-scale agribusinesses.
One example is a new $500 registration fee, regardless of farm size, that would be required of any food producer in the United States. This would be followed by blanket application of complicated monitoring and traceability standards and draconian fines for paperwork infractions ($500,000 or more for first time offense). So stringent are these requirements that many who sell extra vegetables from their home gardens at their local farmer’s markets may decide it’s just not worth the expense.
Another example of this bill’s failings is the wide discretion it gives the FDA to begin to push U.S. food standards into line with Codex Alimentarius. Codex Alimentarius, a United Nations Commission administered and funded by the World Health Organization and Food and Agriculture Organization, promulgates increasingly industrialized food standards and guidelines. Among other restrictions on food freedom, Codex Alimentarius calls for the reclassification of dietary supplements as therapeutic goods or pharmaceuticals and subjects them to the same dosage and labeling restrictions.
While S. 510 does not specifically call for these same restrictions, it does call for the Secretary of Agriculture to develop a plan to “…expand the technical, scientific, and regulatory capacity of foreign governments, and their respective food industries, from which foods are exported to the United States.” The plan must also include, “Recommendations on whether and how to harmonize requirements under the Codex Alimentarius.”
One of the biggest concerns Tea Partiers and other small-government activists have raised over the last two years has been the spiraling cost of government programs like the ones proposed in this bill. S. 510’s current estimated cost is $825,000,000, with an additional 21,600 FDA employees hired at public expense by 2014.
We’ve had several food safety scares these past few years. E. Coli in spinach and peanut butter and a recent egg recall are just a few that spring to mind. However, it bears mentioning that all of these contaminations have occurred at large, industrial-scale food production facilities, not local organic or family farms. Big-government solutions always hurt small businesses the most, and S. 510 is no different. The proposals in this bill will place the greatest burden on small family farms.
A Republican like Richard Burr, claiming hometown small-government values while running in the most potent anti-incumbent year in recent memory, should have nothing to do with a bill like S. 510. We want our food to be safe, but we also want to be able to share the fruits of our home gardens with our neighbors without having to register with the federal government to do it (to say nothing of paying Washington $500 for the “privilege”). Call Burr today at (202) 224-3154 and tell him to drop his sponsorship of S. 510 and vote against it when it comes to the Senate floor.
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