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Thursday, February 27, 2014

New food-safety rules could hurt organic farmers

New safety rules proposed by the Food and Drug Administration are creating headaches for organic farmers, who say the rules are targeting farmers whose product has no history causing illnesses, Evan Halper reports for the Los Angeles Times: The "proposed rules would curtail many techniques that are common among organic growers, including spreading house-made fertilizers, tilling cropland with grazing animals, and irrigating from open creeks."

Other groups disagree on sources of foodborne illnesses. Caroline Smith DeWaal, food-safety director at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, said "farm-to-fork growers need to accept that emerging strains of E. coli and other bacteria can just as easily seep into the produce sold at a farmers market as into the batches of salad bagged at giant processing plants, and they need to tweak their methods to protect against it," Halper writes. She told him, "We don't believe large facilities are the only place where outbreaks are happening."

But the proposed rules could hurt farmers, who say the FDA is out of out touch with farm life, Halper writes. Dave Runsten, policy director for Community Alliance with Family Farmers in Davis, Calif., told Halper, "They are going to drive farms out of business. The consumer groups behind this don't understand farming. They talk out of both sides of their mouth. They demand these one-size-fits-all regulations, then say, 'I don't want to hurt those cute little farmers at the farmers market. I shop at the farmers market.' It is frustrating."

The new rules stem from 2010, when "food-safety activists persuaded Congress to give the FDA authority to regulate farm practices," Halper writes. "The next year, an outbreak of food poisoning that killed 33 people who ate tainted cantaloupes put pressure on the FDA to be aggressive." The first set of proposed rules was first announced in January, 2013, but the FDA said in December it would re-write the rules to appease farmers, who said the laws were too costly. (Read more)

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