After championing a bill to heighten federal regulations and empower the Food and Drug Administration, some of the food industry’s giants found themselves last week trying to kill the measure. The lobby for large food retailers and processors spent two years championing the big-government Food Safety Enhancement Act, while small farmers and processors said the bill’s “one-size-fits-all” regulatory requirements would kill Mom & Pop, helping the big guys.
Consumer groups and the New York Times editorial board joined Big Food in opposing amendments to exempt smaller businesses, but this time Mom & Pop won — sort of. Sens. Jon Tester, D-Mont., and Kay Hagan, D-N.C., inserted an amendment giving small businesses a way out of the strict new rules.
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After the amendment passed, the big guys split. The Grocery Manufacturers Association stuck with the bill while the Produce Marketers’ Association turned against it.
The small-food lobby was also divided. The Organic Consumers’ Association, which had insisted on the Tester-Hagan language, got behind it, while the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund remains vehemently opposed.
The legislation would arm the FDA with mandatory recalls, but also require farms and food processing businesses to comply with onerous record-keeping rules. Big Business liked the measure for the same reasons Big Business often favors strict federal regulation.
Many of the big companies were already employing the practices the FDA would demand, while smaller food makers often use other methods to ensure safety — such as more carefully choosing suppliers. One-size-fits-all regulation, by adding to overhead, disproportionally hits small business, thus giving the big guys an advantage. Big Business also benefits from the government stamp of approval that comes with such regulation, which encourages congressmen, senators and credulous journalists to declare that our food is now safe.
We’ve seen analogous lobbying games in tobacco (where Philip Morris supported the recent regulation that its smaller competitors called the Marlboro Monopoly Act) and toys (where Mattel and Hasbro helped craft a toy-safety law that is already driving small toy makers out of business).
The Produce Marketers Association played the more-regulation-is-better angle, backing the bill until the Senate approved the Tester-Hagan amendment, which gave small farmers and processing companies the ability to earn exemptions. Suddenly, the tables had turned, placing the regulatory yoke more heavily on the big guys, thus giving smaller producers a competitive advantage.
What are the likely consequences if this bill becomes law? Greg Conko at the pro-free-market Competitive Enterprise Institute argues the measure won’t make our food measurably safer. For instance, he argues that the accelerated inspection calendar for food facilities — from once per decade under current law to once every five years under the pending legislation — won’t do much.
Inspectors can spot unsafe conditions, or rats, or huge patches of mold, but the sort of things that usually cause food poisoning can still easily escape the federal inspection under this bill. “You can’t see bacteria. You can’t see viruses. Visual inspection is functionally useless,” Conko told me.
Federal efforts at detecting bad stuff in food have failed. Half of all food-borne illnesses in the United States come from meat and poultry, which undergo daily inspection by the U.S. Department of Agriculture — in fact, USDA inspectors work on site at most meat and poultry processors.
Safety expert Dr. Aubrey Daniels says that this isn’t because Washington isn’t strict enough. “Punishments and penalties are favorite government tactics to ‘enforce compliance,'” Daniels wrote recently in the Washington Post. “The problem is that the penalties rarely affect the unsafe behavior.” Daniels says safety needs to be part of the culture at food companies.
This brings us back to the question of competitive effects. Increased regulation crowds out smaller producers, causing industry consolidation — which makes us less safe. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention concluded recently, “An increasingly centralized food supply means that a food contaminated in production can be rapidly shipped to many states causing a widespread outbreak.”
Tester-Hagan helps here, preserving the freedom of small producers and processors to ensure safety in the way they know best. But some small-business advocates fear the long-term consequences of this expansion of federal power. Pete Kennedy of the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund told the Daily Caller: “Over time the powers given by the bill could possibly whittle away at the protection provided by Tester-Hagan, they’ll have broad power, and unfortunately under their existing power, what we see right now they seem to have three particular targets, which are raw milk, raw cheese, and supplements.”
Regulation is supposed to bring a measure of comfort, but in this case it will have the opposite effect. Consumers won’t feel their food is any safer, and businesses will face greater uncertainty in the marketplace.
Timothy P.Carney, The Examiner’s senior political columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Monday and Thursday, and his stories and blog posts appear on ExaminerPolitics.com.
