The Saturday Food Chain with Michael Olson- February 23rd 2013- The FDA's Power and Protocols to Police

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The Power & Protocols to Police
Food Chain Radio Show #910 • February 23, 2013 • Sat 9AM Pacific

Michael Olson with David Runsten, Community Alliance with Family Farms

and Sandra Esking, Food Safety Campaign
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Can local farmers survive the FDA’s Food Safety police?

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Foodborne illnesses kill an estimated 3,000 people in the United States every year.
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In the last hours of 2010, the U.S. Congress passed the Food Safety Modernization Act, which granted the Food and Drug Administration the power to police the nation’s food chain.  Instead of simply reacting to foodborne contaminations, the FDA, under former Monsanto executive Michael Taylor, will protect against them by policing the nation’s food chain.
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After two years of planning, the FDA has placed over 1,000 pages of new food safety rules and regulations into the public domain for discussion.  These rules and regulations were designed as a one-size-all for agriculture.  However, there are two sizes of agriculture:  an industrial- sized agriculture that produces food for distant markets, and a local-sized  agriculture that produces food for local markets.
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With 1,000 pages of new policing authority, the federal food police will have life and death power over all farmers.  This leads us to ask…
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Can local farmers survive the FDA’s Food Safety police?