Early in 2011, the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) became law.
Congress should repeal all of FSMA at once, reallocate FSMA funding to bolster and expand PulseNet, and get the FDA off the backs of so many American farmers.
Supporters of the law in Congress, big food businesses, and food-safety activists alike claimed the law would help the FDA eliminate what the agency refers to as the “largely preventable,” problem of food-borne illness. Among other things, FSMA provided the FDA with hundreds of millions of dollars annually to regulate and inspect America’s farms and other food producers. As I explain in my book Biting the Hands that Feed Us: How Fewer, Smarter Laws Would Make Our Food System More Sustainable, small farmers across America rightly feared the new inspection regime.
At the time of my book’s publication, FDA’s best estimates of FSMA’s power to reduce actual cases of food-borne illness were paltry. In fact, anyone who read FSMA and the FDA’s final regulations to implement the law would have seen the agency claimed the law’s two key food-safety provisions—one pertaining to produce safety (i.e., fruits and vegetables) and the other to good-manufacturing processes (i.e., processed and packaged foods)—would, I revealed, “reduce cases of food-borne illness by up to 3.7 percent.”
As I’ve explained since, annual cases of foodborne illness in America have remained unchanged more than a decade after FSMA became law. Even in that meager 3.7% estimate, “up to” was doing a lot of work.
So, FSMA costs hundreds of millions of dollars per year but doesn’t make us or our food safer. Not coincidentally, as I wrote recently for the Mercatus Center’s Farming Abundance Project, the number of small farmers in America continues to decline in large part because the regulations they must comply with have only become more and more onerous.
Last year, in a stunning admission, the FDA acknowledged the agency is adrift when it comes to ensuring food safety, and asked for outside help. For an agency so sure that FSMA was the answer to what it called a “largely preventable” problem of food-borne illness, this was nothing less than an acknowledgement by the FDA that FSMA has been a catastrophe for consumers, taxpayers, and small farmers alike.
Despite that fact, FSMA’s rules keep growing.
The FDA’s most recent FSMA rule, finalized last year, created food-traceability paperwork requirements for businesses. This rule is both overly burdensome and duplicative. The CDC’s PulseNet program is an incredibly inexpensive, highly successful, and time-tested tool for mitigating and eliminating outbreaks of food-borne illness.
See the complex “Food Traceability List” here.
The FDA admits that their agency can’t effectively combat food-borne illness, indeed they have between little and no expertise or experience regulating farms. And, unlike the FDA, the CDC (in close cooperation with state and local health departments) has had great success combating foodborne illness.
Congress should repeal all of FSMA at once, reallocate FSMA funding to bolster and expand PulseNet, and get the FDA off the backs of so many American farmers.
Baylen Linnekin is the author of Biting the Hands that Feed Us: How Fewer, Smarter Laws Would Make Our Food System More Sustainable, an adjunct professor at George Mason University Law School and American University and an attorney.
Further Reading:
Toward True Farming Abundance By Baylen J. Linnekin for Farming Abundance
Biting the Hands that Feed Us: How Fewer, Smarter Laws Would Make Our Food System More Sustainable by Baylen Linnekin
Food Regulations: Myths and Games by Richard Williams for Farming Abundance
Phony Demand and Underpopulation: Problems Plaguing American Farmers by Matthew Yglesias for Farming Abundance