Glenn Reynolds
Instapundit
11/26/2010
FOOD SAFETY MEASURE WOULD GIVE SMALL FARMERS INDIGESTION. “The ‘Food Safety Modernization Act’ would not appreciably improve the safety of the food supply in the U.S., but it would create an army of regulators with TSA-like authority over agriculture.”
As millions across the country prepared for their annual Thanksgiving feast, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) was busy taking shots at Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Oklahoma) over food safety, claiming in a letter from a Reid spokesman that Coburn, a physician who has delivered more than 4,000 babies, doesn’t care if children get sick.
Coburn is offering amendments to, and opposing the current form of, Senate Bill 510, the so-called “Food Safety Modernization Act.”
According to Coburn’s camp, this bill, which could come to a vote as early as next week and which is being heavily pushed by Reid and the lame-duck congress, would do nothing to alleviate the few problems there are with food safety in the United States. The U.S. has less than 34 cases of food-borne illness per 100,000 people, and the bill would simply add burdensome regulations and give federal bureaucrats TSA-like authority to do whatever they felt was necessary to “secure the food chain” with little recourse for consumers or producers.
Coburn says the legislation would merely add hundreds of pages of new regulations and more than a billion dollars in spending without doing anything to improve what is already the safest food supply in the world…
