Providing for Consideration of H.R. 2749, Food Safety Enhancement Act of 2009
Floor Speech
PROVIDING FOR CONSIDERATION OF H.R. 2749, FOOD SAFETY ENHANCEMENT ACT OF 2009 -- (House of Representatives - July 30, 2009)
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Mr. FARR. Mr. Speaker, I thank the chairwoman for yielding.
Mr. Speaker, I rise with mixed emotions but in support of the rule. I represent the Salinas Valley, which is one of the most productive agricultural regions of the world. We are the ``Salad Bowl Capital'' of the world. And when you produce fresh produce, for example, lettuce, you don't have a kill step. You can't boil it before you eat it, so you have to be very careful about how you grow this material--lettuce, broccoli, brussels sprouts and all of those things--so you don't have contamination coming from the field.
We have had recalls, the E. coli recall, a very serious recall, and the difficulty we have had over the years is that essentially the Federal responsibility for food safety is in the Food and Drug Administration, the FDA. The responsibility for poultry inspection and meat inspection is in the Department of Agriculture. So you have a split responsibility in this country, and it has been that way for a long, long time.
What you hear in this bill is we need to have some national standards. The authority for those standards lies, for other than meat and poultry, with the Food and Drug Administration. So if you are going to get these standards and get some national credibility and an equal playing field, then you are going to have to work on the food safety for agriculture and organic and all of those others in this legislation.
We have been trying to do that, and the author of the bill, John Dingell, has been a tremendous help in trying to understand the nuances of small farmers, of organic farmers and others that are selling to farmers' markets.
But I hear from all my ag folks that they may not want the FDA, who don't know much about growing practices, to be out there. They do agree we need to have these national standards, that this is the only way we are going to ensure that all food we serve in this country, which has the safest food in the world, is going to be even safer.
So I share the concerns raised by the minority, but I think that the best answer to the problem is to work in a constructive way so that we can develop constructive regulations that benefit everyone, and that is an equal playing field, not a split between the USDA and the FDA.
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