by Aaron Turpen

In the United States House of Representatives, the appropriately mis-named Food Safety Enhancement Act of 2009 (H.R. 2749) passed and is now on its way to the Senate.  The recorded vote can be seen at this link.

The bill is supposedly to regulate the agricultural industry to keep our food supplies safe.  That’s what it claims to do.  What is really does is ad a lot of rules and regulations that all farmers must comply with, large or small, and thus creates a hugely burdensome set of bookkeeping on already over-worked farmers.  Large, corporate “Big Agriculture” farms will have no issues with this, of course, and will just hire another bookkeeper to do it for them.  Smaller, family farms, however, don’t have this luxury.

An excellent writeup on this legislation and how it will effect the small farmer and family, organic farmers can be read at the Oklahoma Food Cooperative at this link.

The gist of the bill is this: there is a potential and already-seen disease spread problem in our nation’s food supply chain.  Mad cow disease, avian flu, and other issues have recently shown this.  What the bill completely ignores is that all of these and nearly all expected problems of this nature are due to poor farming methods of big agriculture and factory farms.

This, of course, proves that the people behind the bill aren’t interested in really keeping the food supply safe.  They’re interested in benefiting Big Ag at the expense of small, family farms.  In other words, business as usual in Washington.  This bill will likely become the end of the small, organic, and family farm as we know it today.

Soon, all of our food will be imported or produced at huge factory farm conglomerates using genetically modified (GMO) seeds and toxic practices.

Thanks a lot, Congress!  You suck!

by Aaron Turpen of Aaron’s EnvironMental Corner

House Resolution 2749 (read it here) is a bill which would give the power to a Food and Drug Administrationofficial to decide what can and can’t be done in farming.  It allows for perpetrators of a basically unnamed offense to be prosecuted and receive up to ten years in prison and be assessed $100,000 fines.  Per offense.

That’s really the gist of the bill, though I’ve obviously been scant on real details.

A great writeup by Ethan Huff of Natural News on HR 2749 explains in much more detail how the bill works.  The Bill is called the “Food Safety Enhancement Act” and seeks to “reform the food supply” so that viruses and pathogens such as Swine Flu and Mad Cow Diseaseare better able to be controlled.

In reality, the bill is a huge nod to factory farms and GMO seed makers and a giant set of chains for small farms and local, artisan producers.

After you’ve learned about what the bill entails and how it will do nothing but put small, local (and healthy) producers out of business in favor of factory farms, you can help fight this bill’s passage:

A petition can be electronically signed to go to your representatives in Washington atPeaceTeam.net.

You can also sign a petition against HR 2749 and in support of HR 778 (to legalize raw milk products) at Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund at ftcdf.org.