Public Health

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Letting Nature Lead

The past year has been an extraordinary one in the world of sustainable agriculture for many reasons, some of which may not be fully understood for many years to come.  That year (November ’12 thru November ’13) included much attention across the country to labeling of genetically engineered foods, including two high-profile public referendums that went down to defeat in California and the state of Washington. For many, this effort, occurring state-by-state, has become the holy grail of the effort to promote local, sustainable and organic food and farming systems for the future.

But for me and many of my closest colleagues across the country, the past year has been about something much less glamorous, i.e. the drive to understand, explain and then fix the problems in proposed regulations associated with the federal Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA). This was certainly a long slog by any measure, with dozens of folks working together to generate hundreds of pages of public commentary in response to thousands of pages of material we were given to digest last January. It was an extraordinary experience that I wouldn’t want to repeat, but the sort of work that had to be done at a critical moment in our sustainable food system movement. Continue reading →

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A Message to Public Officials on Food Safety

{Blogger’s note: I know I said there would be no more posts before the end of the FSMA comment period on November 15, but I came across this statement approved by PASA’s board of directors at the very beginning of this process nearly five years ago, and thought it was worth sharing again at this time. Our views have matured considerably since that time, but the basic points are the same. Please keep in mind that help is available for commenting on the proposed rules at the PASA website, including templates to follow and links directly to FDA}

Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture (PASA) — May 22, 2009

It seems everyone in elected office these days wants to do something about food safety.  Who can blame them, given that the headlines on any particular day might carry news of the latest food poisoning scare?  It is a supreme paradox that, while all of us must eat in order to survive, food can also become an instrument of death.  As a community of farmers, we must also come to terms with the fact that harmful pathogens occasionally present in food can originate on farms in various ways that at times defy easy explanation. Continue reading →

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Consider the Bees of the Field

{Blogger’s note: This post was completed with the very welcome assistance of my colleague Jo Ann Baumgartner, director of the Wild Farm Alliance located in Watsonville, California. Jo Ann can be reached at wildfarms@earthlink.net}

I was honored to be asked this year to address the annual conference of the Eastern Apicultural Society (EAS) held in early August in West Chester, Pennsylvania.  With well over 500 professional beekeepers and bee scientists present, it was also a tremendous opportunity for me to learn something about a topic with which I had very little previous experience. I was both amazed and a bit alarmed with what I learned.

While the occurrence of Colony Collapse Disorder has captured the concern of the general public, very few people know just how complex the situation with honeybees really is.  I’ll add that even fewer have any idea how the viability of the bee population might be affected by the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA). Congress passed FSMA in 2010, and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has now issued proposed rules for its implementation, with a deadline of November 15, 2013 for public comment.

In brief, the situation for honeybees and other pollinators, already dire in some places, is likely to get worse as new regulations associated with FSMA take effect. It really comes down to loss of biodiversity in the diet of honeybees and potential destruction of the habitat necessary for their survival. To the extent that food safety regulations make these situations any worse, by promoting the separation – far away from food crops – of what also functions as wildlife habitat, so will the pollinators, and ultimately the crops themselves, suffer. Continue reading →