Tell Congress to Protect Sustainable Farms and Our Food Supply
5/7/2009

A number of produce safety bills are circulating in Congress in the aftermath of the fiasco with peanut paste manufactured at a Georgia factory. Many of these bills  would apply a one-size-fits-all approach to protecting our food supply, treating all food sources, including sustainable family farms, as major hazards, instead of focusing on the actual, proven risks in our food supply.

Call your Congress member and Senators and tell them that any produce safety bill MUST BE:

* Scale-appropriate. Federal law should support producers at each level, not impose a one-size-fits-all approach that runs small farms and farmers markets out of business.

* Risk-based. Measures to mitigate produce safety risk or to implement safety solutions must be based on actual risk assessments for different products and scales of farms, not assumptions based on an industrial food model. 

* Science-based.  Specific measures to mitigate produce safety risk or specific metrics included in produce safety solutions, must be based on sound science, specific to the growing conditions on individual farms. Funding research to develop a science-based approach to on-farm produce safety should be a priority

* Provide tiered compliance alternatives. Compliance with produce safety measures should be tiered to reflect farm size, market served and risk, for instance, a 2-acre fruit and vegetable producer selling exclusively through farmers markets or CSAs within 50 miles of the farm vs. a several hundred acre producer shipping produce to multiple outlets in multiple states. A tiered compliance program would include training on on-farm produce safety for all producers, with larger producers choosing to comply with more rigorous certifications to meet buyer specifications, not federally-mandated standards.

* Focused on education, not regulation. On-farm food safety should center around education and incentives rather than mandated regulations with punitive measures for non-compliance.

Contact your representaive now!