In This Issue:

Page 5 …................…. AG Census and Farm Trends Page 22 ….................. Political Action Committee forms Page 22 ............ Former Gov. Jeb Bush on Immigration

FDA promises help
on FSMA rules;
Not crackdowns

At the United Fresh-FMI convention in mid-June, the Food and Drug Administration said that they will look to educate before it enforces new food safety laws.

Roberta Wagner, deputy director for regulatory affairs for the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition Stressing voluntary compliance of the Food Safety Modernization Act, stressed voluntary compliance of the Food Safety Modernization Act.

All rules for FSMA are due from the agency in 2015. Wagner often referred to an FDA document issued May 2 that outlines the agency’s strategy on the rules. She said there are three basic steps to enact the FSMA: rule-making, planning and implementation.

“What we really want is to gain voluntary industry compliance with these new standards so that when we do start inspecting against the standards and find noncompliance, what we want is voluntary industry corrections that are adequate and timely,’ she said.

Part of FDA’s challenge is creating a new way of treating inspections. For example, Wagner said that looking at independent third-party audits showed new ways to determine whether a company has a culture of food safety.

“What we’re learning is that there is a line of questioning that helps establish whether there is a food safety culture in a facility or on a given farm, and we don’t have that line of questioning,” she said. ”We need to ask different questions to assess if there is a food safety culture in a given facility or in a growing operation.” Wagner said the FDA also may want to give industry credit for making voluntary corrections. To do that, she said the agency plans to capture more data on voluntary compliance. “To elicit the culture change, we literally have to start with the way we hire, what we look at in our investigators, how we train our investigators and how we establish compliance strategies,” she said.

She indicated that the current FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg wants to create a new inspection culture whereby FDA inspectors are not inspecting food one day, feed the next, medical devices another day, etc. She wants specialization to develop expertise in specific areas.

As the FDA establishes the FSMA’s produce safety rule, the agency will have produce safety experts to help growers comply. The agency will also put more emphasis on data analysis and risk factors.

Put pesticides in
perspective

By Barbara Quinn I gulped down a handful of juicy red grapes as we ran out the door. My friend Chris munched on an apple as we drove out of town. Later we shared a bowl of strawberries and other assorted berries. Should we worry?

According to the Environmental Working Group (EWG) — a nonprofit organization whose stated mission is “to protect public health and the environment” — these are a few of the foods targeted on their scary-sounding “Dirty Dozen” list, foods they found to have higher levels of pesticide residues.

Buy the organic version of these foods, says the EWG.

Not so fast, says the Alliance for Food and Farming (AFF) — another nonprofit that represents farmers of organic and conventional crops. This organization ( www.safefruitsandvegetables.com) says conclusions reached by the EWG may unnecessarily scare people from eating perfectly safe and healthy food.

The issue, says UC Davis food toxicologist Carl Winter, stems from the methods used by the EWG to come up with its “Dirty Dozen” list. It’s not just the presence of one or more residues on a food that determines risk, he explains. It’s the amount. His research on the same foods found the potential risk from exposure to pesticides — on organic as well as conventionally grown crops — is negligible.

To put this in perspective, says the AFF, a child could eat 154 conventionally grown apples in one day with the highest pesticide residue ever recorded by monitoring agencies and still not reach a level that would have any effect on health.

So the point seems not so much whether a fruit or vegetable is grown with the use of organic or conventional pesticides but whether or not we are eating those fruits or vegetables.

Truckloads of studies over the past decades show without a doubt the health benefits of eating fresh produce. And these studies have largely been conducted using those that have been grown conventionally. It’s been estimated, for example, that we can have a 42 percent lower risk of dying prematurely if we eat at least seven servings of fruit and vegetables a day. (A “serving” is 1/2 cup cooked or 1 cup raw, organic or conventionally grown).

Even the EWG, which publishes the “Dirty Dozen” list, confirms that “the health benefits of a diet rich in fruits and vegetables outweigh risks of pesticide exposure.”

Timelines for FSMA
rules released

The FDA Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), the most sweeping reform of our food safety laws in more than 70 years, signed into law on January 4,

2011, aims to ensure the U.S. food supply is safe by shifting the focus from responding to contamination to preventing it.

The Center for Food Safety (FDA) and the Center for Environmental Health have created a new timeline for the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) rules.

FDA and two advocacy groups reached a settlement in a case appealing the strict, court-imposed deadlines for FDA’s publication of final versions of the rules.

Each rule represents major changes to the industry and FDA in how the safety of human and animal food is controlled and regulated, both domestically and imported. It’s critical that FDA have the time to ensure that the final rules are right.

The agreement requires FDA to issue the following regulations under new deadlines: preventive controls for human and animal food (8/30/15); imported food and foreign suppliers (10/31/15); produce safety (10/31/15); food transportation (3/31/16); and intentional adulteration of food (5/31/16); sanitary transportation (3/31/16); and intentional food adulteration (5/31/16).

As one expert said, we should all try to minimize the amount of pesticides on the food we eat. But we don’t have to avoid conventionally produced foods to meet that goal.

Should we eat more vegetables and fruit? Yes. Can we safely choose produce that has been grown organically or conventionally? Yes.

I applaud all our American farmers who groan under the weight of intense food safety regulations to assure we have the safest food in the entire world.