Food unSafety Enhancement Act (HR 2749) Passes House
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.
sprayer1This, 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!
-----
Got comments? Email me, dammit!
Permanent link for this article which can be used on any website:
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.
sprayer1This, 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!
-----
Got comments? Email me, dammit!
Permanent link for this article which can be used on any website:
posted by Aaron Turpen @ 4:44 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home