Smart Energy

A couple weeks ago I wrote about a couple pieces of federal legislation that folks were getting up in arms about, saying they would “ban organic farming.” As I pointed out, the bloggers writing about the bills were, at best, misreading and perhaps deliberately using scare tactics in order to stir up trouble, comments and links. The bills in question have spawned a netroots fever of apocalyptic (non)thinking which, as the Ethicurean points out, distract from the truly bad legislation floating around the Hill. Snip:

Perhaps the worst of the lot is HR 1332, Rep. Costa’s Safe FEAST Act of 2009, which is backed by the Big Ag group Western Growers. It would create a HACCP system for produce. (HACCP is the set of burdensome recordkeeping requirements credited with hastening the demise of many small-scale slaughter facilities.) It doesn’t take the size of operations into account. It would pay for inspections by charging fees to farms and processors and would hand the duty of inspection over to third-party certifiers. Because yeah, that’s worked so well for us to date.

Then there’s Rep. DeGette’s H.R. 814, which actually does mandate a National Animal Identification System, which we and lots of other people have major concerns about. And there’s H.R. 759, offered by Rep. Dingell, which requires traceability of food from farm to restaurants and requires that the recordkeeping be done electronically. It also charges fees to processors — small or large — for inspections.

None of these bills are good for small farmers, and I hope we might agree that they would all be worse than H.R. 875.