Food Riots & Food Police Update

This article continues a theme I began in Food Riots of 2009? and Beware the Food Police

Congress is working on some legislation that will benefit huge agribusiness and place an onerous burden upon small farms and homesteads. RPC sent me the link to an article at worldnetdaily.

Here's an excerpt from the article:

Under the legislation's broad wording, slaughterhouses, seafood processing plants, establishments that process, store, hold or transport all categories of food products prior to delivery for retail sale, farms, ranches, orchards, vineyards, aquaculture facilities and confined animal-feeding operations would be subject to strict government regulation.

Government inspectors would be required to visit and examine food production facilities, including small farms, to ensure compliance. They would review food safety records and conduct surveillance of animals, plants, products or the environment.

"What the government will do is bring in industry experts to tell them how to manage all this stuff," Olson said. "It's industry that's telling government how to set these things up. What it always boils down to is who can afford to have the most influence over the government. It would be those companies that have sufficient economies of scale to be able to afford the influence – which is, of course, industrial agriculture."

Just as the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) enjoys a sweetheart relationship with the pharmaceutical industry, so the new Food Safety Administration will serve the interests of the agribusiness giants. The article quotes Michael Olson as follows:

Olson believes the regulations could create unjustifiable financial hardships for small farmers and run them out of business" [It] is often the purpose of rules and regulations: to get rid of your competition," he said. "Only people who are very, very large can afford to comply. They can hire one person to do paperwork. There's a specialization of labor there, and when you are very small, you can't afford to do all of these things."

. . . and, Grandma, what big teeth you have:

According to the act, "Any person that commits an act that violates the food safety law … may be assessed a civil penalty by the Administrator of not more than $1,000,000 for each such act."

Each violation and each separate day the producer is in defiance of the law would be considered a separate offense and an additional penalty. The act suggests federal administrators consider the gravity of the violation, the degree of responsibility and the size and type of business when determining penalties.

Criminal sanctions may be imposed if contaminated food causes serious illness or death, and offenders may face fines and imprisonment of up to 10 years.

President Obama has also weighed in on this issue:

The president said outbreaks from contaminated foods, such as a recent salmonella outbreak among consumers of peanut products, have occurred more frequently in recent years due to outdated regulations, fewer inspectors, scaled back inspections and a lack of information sharing between government agencies.

The problem with the president's statement is twofold:

1) The president did not touch on the real cause of the widespread outbreaks of food contamination, which is the centralization of food production, processing and distribution (agribusiness). When there were many, small suppliers, contaminated food might affect a few people in a limited geographic area. Now, with just a few major suppliers, a contaminated batch of food may potentially affect millions across the nation.

2) The proposed solution to the problem will only consolidate control of the food supply in the hands of relatively few major agri-corporations. It will regulate the small producers out of existence, assuring that any level of food contamination will result in a system-wide crisis.

There are some other problems I see down the road. What has big pharma's cozy relationship to bureaucratic regulators done for the price of health care? Don't you think big Agra's move from going steady to a full-blown courtship with Washington will have the same effect?

In addition, futher centralization almost guarantees disruptions of the food supply down the road. When everything comes through one channel of supply, the fall of a single domino may create a chain reaction that spells catastrophe.

When people get hungry, they become restive. If the food police don't get you, the hungry mobs may.

How are you preparing (both in terms of tactics & food storage)?