HR 875 - ARE THE FARM POLICE COMING?

With the advent of the swine flu outbreak...and the backdrop of peanut butter contamination, it seems as though this bill will pass, regardless of anyone's sentiment about it. I think this debate is over. The true impact of this legislation will be in the findings/opinions/verdicts in Case Law in decades to come--which is the basis of practical jurisprudence, I'm learning.

Nate Pederson

Thanks for clearing this up. Glad you're out there watching.

Hello everyone,
I've read the bill , and it really has little to do with farms at all. It is about removing Food Safety from the FDA, so that someone will be watching our for food's safety. It is a result of all of the food-ourne illnesses that have been cropping up.(Excuse the pun)
Right now the FDA has their hands full with tracking the drugs which the drug companies push through. There isn't any one person (no head of the department) that is in charge of food safety. Each state handles food-bourne illness outbreaks differently.
When the Peanut Corporation of America had the first positive test on salmonella, they took another sample, and sent it to a different testing facility. That bought them enough time to send the contaminated peanut butter paste out into the food system to be distributed. The head of the Health Department in Oregon went to the house of the little boy who was the source of the sample that broke the case. If it were not for that one Health Department employee in Oregon, who linked one patient to a particular strain of the bacteria from a contaminated sample from the little boy's pantry in his house, we may not have been able to positively say that we know what happened. If there was a protocol in place that required that the Food Safety Administration would need to be notified by testing facilities for each positive reading, there could have been several deaths prevented.
Did anyone else watch the hearing on C-SPAN?
This bill is for food processors. The companies that take the raw materials from farmers, and turn those products into food. (This bill doesn't cover meats. Meats are governed by the USDA.) There were maybe three sentences that even metnion farms or ranches.

I think this bill has the potential to be a strong weapon against big agribusiness. If the FDA became the Drug Development Administration ecause food was removed from the jurisdiction, then big Drug Companies would need to go through two Federal agencies to control the food system. Right now they have a free pass, kind of like a federal bait and switch. Don't look now at what we're doing to your foods, because we're keeping you way too busy investigating all these drugs.
If we had another agency protecting our food supply, the drug companies might not be able to run slip-shod over so many farmers. One of the biggest threats to our food system is Genetically Engineered organisms, (Also known as Genetically Modified Organisms, GMO's). GMO's are coming from drug companies.....

We may want to pay attention to this one. There are a lot of newspapers, blogs and individuals picking up the pace opposing this bill. I have not had time to study but Here's a Link that kind of sums it up:

http://shepardpolitics.blogspot.com/2009/03/hr-875-would-essentially-outlaw-family.html