Food Safety Bill HR 2749 Threat to Organic Farming

The Food Safety Bill HR 2749 is less about food safety and more about giving the Federal Government, through the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the power to control food from production to point of sale. The one size to fit all regulatory system will mean that small family farms and homesteaders will be at a major disadvantage when competing with the large industrial food production companies.

Opponents of the Bill say that if this Bill becomes law then most family farms, including organic farms, and homesteaders will be forced to go out of business. Which will mean the end of buying locally grown food and in particular organic food from organic food stores.

Some of the provisions in HR 2749 are -

The establishment of a food and ingredient tracking system. Which will track all edible raw materials from the land, or industry complex, to the retail outlets. How this will be accomplished is to be left to the FDA to create. The fear is that this tracking system will not only be complicated but that the FDA will pass the cost onto the food business facilities in the form of extra taxation.

The FDA will have the legal authority to turn up at a food facility's place of business without a warrant and conduct a search of the business records without any justification, i.e. the food facility need not necessarily have committed any offense or be suspected of having committed any offence.

If you owned a farm, or a shop, where you did all the work yourself. If the FDA were to turn up at your premises unannounced and conduct a search of all of your business records which could take all day, or several days, how much work would you get done? Would you consider the intrusion a major setback in the running of your business? Do you consider it would not happen to you?

Here are just three examples, as listed on Mike Adams web site, of the many armed raids carried out by the FDA on independent businesses.

1. During October 2007 the FDA conducted a raid on the premises of FulLife Natural Options, Inc, based in Florida. The FDA took away 71,000 dollars worth of herbal supplements. FulLife's crime was to state on their web site that the herbal supplements could lower blood sugar levels.

2. In 1990 FDA agents, without a search warrant, raided the pet food store of 57 year old Sissy Harrington-McGill, confiscating products and literature. Her crime was to say that vitamins could help keep pets healthy.

3. In 1992, in Texas, the FDA conducted raids on 12 health food stores. Stock was confiscated and never returned to the owners. No reason was given for the raids and no charges were filed. According to Mike Adams "The raids were simply a campaign of terror designed to destroy the inventory and disrupt business operations of stores selling natural health products".

The FDA will have the power to stop the movement of all food in an area regardless of the fact that the food may or may not be involved in a contamination scare. In theory this could result in some retail outlets in the designated area, such as farmers markets, running out of food.

The FDA will have the power to instruct farmers how to grow their crops. This could result in organic farms being forced to use chemical pesticides and fertilizers, thus reduce or obliterate organic standards.

All food facilities who produce, store, process or sell food will be required to pay an annual mandatory registration fee the 500 dollars. If you ever sell your surplus food to your neighbor then this also includes you.

Any individual person who violates any regulation set by the FDA will face criminal charges with a maximum fine of up to 100,000 dollars per violation and up to ten years in prison.

The legal power to be given to the FDA is horrific by any reasonable person's standards. Which is why the organic farming organisation "The Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund" is so strongly opposed to HR 2749. If this Bill should become law then it is more than likely that in the near future the only food available to buy will be processed food either frozen, in a packet or can. Fresh food will become a rarity.

One last point. Even if fruit and vegetables in their natural state are still available there is a high probability that they will not be fresh. The FDA is well known for its support for the irradiation of food. If the FDA get full control of the food supply it is highly likely that they will regulate that all natural unprocessed food is to be irradiated. Their excuse for the irradiation of fresh food - food safety.

Reform of the State and Public Programs

Historically, there is the concern of evaluating public programs in general and social programs in particular. For years, the production of technical knowledge in the pursuit of improved standards of management in the public sector has always been much more oriented to the processes of formulation of programs than those related to its implementation and evaluation.

The negative economic growth caused a demand for action and social services, especially the nature of compensation.

The systematic, continuous and effective evaluation of these programs can be the key tool for achieving better results providing a better use and control of resources that they use.

Regardless the situation of crisis, the assessment of performance has always been important in the public sector. Efforts to reform the state take place in all countries of the planet providing a wonderful challenge: making it work better, but with a lower cost.

The pursuit of this improvement is the evaluation of the performance of the public programs, the opportunity and chance to assess to the performance of the state organization.

Establishing effectiveness, efficiency and effectiveness as measures of government success are created ways to evaluate different alternatives to achieve similar results.

The authority and power is delegated to the autonomous agencies and private companies to run their services, increasing the need for evaluation. In fact, privatization of public services increased autonomy granted to public agencies, requiring the adoption of ways of defining performance in contract, based on the prior definition of indicators and measures of success.

That requires that the government develop tools and evaluation methodologies, consistent to offer a stronger leadership for making decisions on public policy for a more accurate assessment on the performance of such agencies.

The purpose of the evaluation is to guide the decision-makers, advising them about the continuity, the need for corrections or suspension of a particular policy or program. If the assessment is a way to measure the performance of programs, it is necessary to establish measures to gauge results. They are called the evaluation criteria and that point has been the consensus on conceptual and methodological issues in the evaluation of programs and policies.

The list of criteria that can be used is long and the choice of one or several of them, depends on the aspects you want to focus on evaluation. The most common are:

- Efficiency - resulted in economic term that means the lowest cost / benefit possible to achieve the objectives set in the program;

- Effectiveness - measure of the degree to which the program achieves its objectives and targets;

- Impact (or effectiveness) - indicates that the project has an effect (positive) in the external environment in which intervened on a technical, economic, socio-cultural, institutional and environmental factors;

- Sustainability - measures the ability to continue the beneficial effects achieved through the social program, after it ends;

- Cost-effectiveness - like the idea of opportunity cost and the concept of relevance, is the comparison of alternative forms of social action to achieve certain effects, to be selected this activity / project that meets the objectives with the cost;

- Satisfaction of the beneficiary - evaluates the user's attitude on the quality of care that is getting the program;

- Equity - evaluates the degree to which the benefits of a program are being distributed fairly and consistent with the needs of the user.

The application of these criteria requires specific forms of operation, as are indirect measures that should be calculated from the identification and quantification of results.

In general, it is referred to that other category of measures of indicators. There are also a variety of ways to define and use this measure, depending on the area and the purpose of evaluation.

The output indicators reflect the level of satisfaction of basic needs that the program met. They are also called indicators of living standards.

The input indicators refer to the means (resources) available to achieve a certain standard of living. The evaluation of the performance of a program requires setting standards of reference for judging the performance. They could be: absolute, targets set by programs that are considered the standard to be achieved and the deviations should be recorded and analyzed.

A methodology for evaluating social programs involves, then, the choice of criteria and the use of a range of indicators (or other forms of measurement) consistent with the criteria chosen and that would allow a examination on the continued and effective performance of a program or set of programs, by comparison with the previously established standards of performance.