Ron Amundson’s Political Blog

To establish the Food Safety Administration within the Department of Health and Human Services to endanger the public health by encouraging food-borne illness, decreasing the safety of food, improving research on contaminants leading to food-borne illness, and decreasing the security of food from intentional contamination, and for other purposes.

1. It encourages food borne illness through consolidation of operations, through preferable treatment to large agribusiness.

Its interesting to note the major food borne illness outbreaks are the result of large consolidated ag practices, which are encouraged under this bill. Diversity of production is a national security concern. Imagine the consequences of Monsanto, or ADM screw up in a huge way, its not a matter of if, its a matter of when, biology can be messy that way. In part, this is why small producers are subsidized to encourage some level of diversity. Just as we found in banking, the too large to fail mantra, and the monopolistic practices granted to some firms are counter productive. Thousands of small banks did ok. The 18 or so super banks are in serious trouble.

2. It decreases the safety of food, by a massive influx of new and inexperienced inspectors, and focuses more on the administrative side than physical inspection and testing.

The FDA is tragically undefunded as it is. Adding a new overhead layer of govt, re-arranging all the chairs, increasing the paper work burden, and the inspection scope, will require a massive increase in human resources and training. As a result, experienced people are likely to be diverted to greater administrative functions, rather than being in the field. The end result, greater administrative functions, and a focus on paperwork inspections, combined with less actual testing, planning, and review by those skilled in the art.

3. It decreases the security of food from intentional contamination.

This comes back to the diversity issue once again. Ie, one person could now jeopardize security of food for millions of people, rather than just a local area. It would no longer be necessary to utilize massive terrorist cells for a ampaign, as the vulnerabilities are so concentrated. The lone errant individual would be a much greater concern as well. Introducing pathogens in the food supply chain is not rocket science, doing it over a large scale as existed 30 years ago would be impossible. Today, its possible but difficult. After passage of this bill, it would be rather simple.

In many ways large agribusiness using transgenic crops is in effect a bio lab on a large scale, and its open for business pretty much anytime day or night, with exceedingly limited security. Such crops pose a serious enough problem in the south that over 50% of biotech cotton land must be used as refuge acres, and even here in the north, the EPA requires 20%. The idea is to prevent transgenic crops from loosing their specific traits as concerns insect resistance. Its a similiar situation with volunteer corn having different gene expressions than off the shelf corn. In other words, if left unchecked its a disaster waitng to happen. Case in point, BT volunteer corn.