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July 31, 2009
·
House passes far-reaching food safety bill
· Fresh-farm produce promotion for a digital age
· Microchip measures real-time water stress
· Top suspects in honeybee disordered named
· Produce opportunities in foodservice – report
House passes far-reaching food safety bill
(Eds note: See United Fresh
Produce Association statement below)
(AP
via Yahoo! News)
The legislation
would require greater oversight of food manufacturers and give the Food and
Drug Administration new authority to order recalls. It also would require the
FDA to develop a system for better tracing food-borne illnesses. Food companies
would be required to create detailed food safety plans.
President Barack
Obama praised the bill soon after it was passed, calling it "a major step
forward in modernizing our food safety system."
Farm-state members
had argued that the bill would be too invasive on farms and had pushed
colleagues to vote against it as it was considered under a special procedure
that requires a two-thirds vote. It was rejected Wednesday by a few votes.
Democrats scrambled
to put the legislation back on the House floor Thursday under a rule that
required a simple majority to pass. The vote was 283-142.
Supporters said the
legislation would help the FDA change its focus from a reactive to a more
preventive approach in keeping the nation's food safe.
"Americans are
dying because the Food and Drug Administration doesn't have the authority to
protect them," said Michigan Rep. John Dingell, the bill's sponsor and a
long-serving Democrat who has been pushing for tougher standards for more than
a decade.
A similar bill
sponsored by Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., has not yet seen action in the
Senate.
The legislation
gained new momentum in the wake of one of the largest product recalls in
Those outbreaks have
exposed a lack of resources and authority at the FDA as the embattled agency
has struggled to contain and trace them. In the peanut outbreak, FDA inspectors
quickly focused on the small
Connecticut Rep.
Rosa DeLauro has said the bill is a solid first step but said she believes
Congress needs to go even further and reorganize FDA to help it better focus on
its "food" mission. She has introduced legislation that would divide
the FDA in two, separating the agency's drug oversight and food safety duties.
The FDA regulates
most foods, though as many as 15 federal agencies have a hand in food safety.
The Agriculture Department inspects meats, poultry and some eggs.
The bill, which has
support from the food industry as well as a wide range of consumer groups,
would give the agency the authority to order recalls if a company fails to act
on its own, and would increase the frequency of inspections to high-risk food
processing facilities. It would charge food processors an annual $500 fee to
help defray the cost of increased enforcement.
Sponsors tweaked the
legislation in recent days to appease the farm-state members who objected to
it. Last-minute changes included modifying the way a trace-back system would
work, clarifying that some hard-to-trace products, such as grains, would not be
tracked to individual farms. It also lessened paperwork for some farms and
clarified that some smaller operations would not have to register with the FDA
or pay fees.
Those changes
appeased most farm-state Democrats, but many Republicans still voted against
it, saying it would be invasive to farmers and not do enough to improve food
safety. Oklahoma Rep. Frank Lucas, the top Republican on the House Agriculture
Committee, led the charge against the legislation.
"The bill still
goes too far in the direction of trying to produce food from a bureaucrat's
chair in
United Fresh Produce
Association statement
Washington /PRNewswire-USNewswire/
-- United Fresh Produce Association President and CEO Tom Stenzel
releases the following statement on today's passage of the Food Safety
Enhancement Act (H.R. 2749) by the U.S. House of Representatives on a vote of
283 to 142:
"United Fresh is gratified by the House
passage of this landmark food safety legislation, which contains several
important provisions designed to improve our nation's food safety and help
bolster consumer confidence in the food supply. United Fresh is largely
supportive of the bill, which has received broad bipartisan support. Over the
past two years, United Fresh has supported congressional action on food safety
and appreciates the opportunity to provide critical input to lawmakers in
development of the bill.
"The bill includes several important
improvements, as advocated by United Fresh, including:
- Strengthened the bill's commodity-specific approach to produce;
- Ensured that FDA would work with USDA, state departments of
agriculture and other agencies in implementing all produce provisions;
- Kept a mandate for traceability across all foods, but without
prescriptive dictates that could have set back work on our current Produce
Traceability Initiative;
- Exempted produce from any duplicative requirements for country of
origin labeling;
- Enhanced the ability of fresh processors to develop individual
HACCP programs without rigid one-size fits-all mandates;
- Assured equal treatment of imported and domestic produce in food
safety standards;
- Ensured tighter control of potential FDA geographic quarantine
authority, requiring an imminent threat to take such action and
coordination with USDA; and,
- Capped registration fees for both facilities and importers.
"While United is supportive of these
improvements to H.R. 2749, there are still important issues that we will
address with the Senate as it begins its work on food safety legislation later
this year. We look forward to continued bipartisan support and industry
cooperation to ensure passage of sound, scientific food safety legislation that
can benefit all Americans."
United Fresh Produce Association is the pre-eminent trade association for the produce
industry in managing critical public policy issues; shaping legislative and
regulatory action; providing scientific and technical leadership in food safety,
quality assurance, nutrition and health; and developing educational programs
and business opportunities for members to better meet consumer needs for
increased consumption of fresh produce. Founded in 1904, United Fresh
represents the interests of member companies from small family businesses to
the largest international corporations throughout the global fresh produce
supply chain, including growers, shippers, fresh-cut processors, wholesalers,
distributors, retailers, foodservice operators, industry suppliers and allied
associations. For more information, visit www.unitedfresh.org
SOURCE United Fresh Produce Association
Fresh-farm produce promotion for a digital age
(delewareonline.com)
– Last week, Michael Fennemore sent out a Twitter
message from
Within five minutes, a customer arrived to buy some of the red and yellow globes, alerted on her wireless Internet device while standing in line at a nearby bank.
"She would have gone home if it was just an e-mail or something like that," said Fennemore, retail sales manager at Fifer. "But because it was a Twitter message, it's effective, it's quick and it's easy."
The orchard is one of a small handful but growing number of
Other markets and small operations throughout the county send out regular Tweets, including a Gumboro-area beekeeper.
Large agriculture and bioscience companies -- including DuPont and Monsanto -- use Twitter to chat about their products, too.
And the state recently launched two Craigslist-like forums for selling farm-fresh food and agricultural equipment and livestock.
Rick Christensen, the beekeeper, has used Twitter to promote the honey he sells for about the last three to four months, adding to promoting it through his Web site and by word-of-mouth.
"It all helps," said Christensen, who has run Country Fresh Bee Farms for about 15 years.
It has taken some time for farmers -- generally older than the average Internet user -- to get online, attributable to both the generation gap and the Internet access gap. The cell phone and fax machine are now widespread among farmers, with faxes still heavily preferred over e-mail to get deals done, said Delaware Secretary of Agriculture Ed Kee.
The optimism and success stories are overshadowed by the stark reality that farmers and rural areas lag far behind the rest of the country in access to the information and experiences available on the Internet.
"I live in a rural area where I'm still on
dial-up," said Kee, who lives in the
In a 2007 study, only 28 percent of
An initiative is under way to assess and expand broadband
access in
But even if farmers had the same level of online connectivity as people who live in more urban areas, they wouldn't all necessarily use it on a widespread basis, Kee said.
Farmers of commodity crops such as corn, grain and soybeans are probably tracking local and national grain prices online, for example, but may make only a handful of actual deals every year, in person or over the phone. And such farmers don't need to connect with the general public to sell their wares, leaving most of the Twittering and Facebook friending activity to direct-to-consumer operations.
Yet some farmers of commodity crops across the country have tapped into the instant-connection capability of such sites to educate the public about what they do.
"People can read what we're working on that day, the
issues we're facing, why we do the things we do and more," said Debbie
Borg, a farmer from
So far, only a handful of people have used the sites. On DEFoodTrader, farmers hawk everything from sweet corn, peppers, squash and peas to emu meat. On DEAgTrader, they market items to other farmers, offering free horse manure or selling rabbits or greenhouse pots.
Farmer's market operators have a different audience than commodity farmers.
Fifer said for his target audience -- younger families, young mothers and children looking for family-friendly activities and experiences -- social networking sites are important ways to communicate, making it important that the orchard interact with that audience as well, Fennemore said.
A Facebook site has attracted nearly 600 fans since March, providing a forum where people can chat and comment about the food.
"It's kind of an interesting phenomenon," Fennemore said. "It's really neat just to see the back-and-forth."
Microchip measures real-time water stress
(Cornell University) – Fifteen years ago, when Alan Lakso first sought to enlist Cornell's nanofabrication laboratory to develop a tiny sensor that would measure water stress in grapevines, the horticultural sciences professor ended up back at the drawing board.
It wasn't until Abraham Stroock, associate professor of chemical engineering, had a breakthrough of his own that Lakso's vision began to take shape. Stroock's lab recently developed a synthetic tree that mimics the flow of water inside plants using a slab of hydrogel with nanometer-scale pores. At last Lakso had access to the technology to move forward.
The device is an embedded microsensor capable of measuring real-time water stress in living plants. In theory, the sensor will help vintners strike the precise balance between drought and overwatering -- both of which diminish the quality of wine grapes.
"To manage for optimum stress," said Lakso, a researcher at the New York State Agricultural
Experiment Station in
With Vinay Pagay,
a graduate student with degrees in computer engineering and viticulture, the
team is working at the Cornell Nanofabrication Facility in
The team hopes to design a sensor that will transmit field
readings wirelessly to a central server; the data will then be summarized
online for the grower. The concept has already received attention from E. &
J. Gallo Winery in
Looking ahead, the team is pursuing alternative sensors that could enhance research in fields from food science to forestry. They have begun development of a "multi-use sensor" that redirects water flow inside the plant through a shunt. In this case, the sensor could measure the flow of water and mineral nutrients through the plant, in addition to water stress. Pagay described it as "a lab on a chip."
Beyond winemaking, the technology has implications for manufacturing, food processing and electronics. Team member Taryn Bauerle, assistant professor of horticulture, described how such sensors could be implanted throughout trees in a forest ecosystem to measure water use and nutrient flow on a large scale with unprecedented accuracy. "All of these [researchers'] brains are coming together," she said. "There's no limit to where we can take this type of technology."
Top suspects in bee disordered named
(WSU News) –
The deadly phenomenon is called colony collapse disorder.
Finding a solution is important to Northwest beekeepers and farmers who rent beehives to pollinate orchards and crops. Correspondent Tom Banse reports.
Industry associations estimate Northwest beekeepers sustained colony losses around 30 percent through the winter. That's bad.
What's good is that a research team at
Entomologist Steve Sheppard pinpoints two likely suspects.
One is a new fungal infection. The other is high levels of herbicide, fungicide, and insecticide residues in honeycombs -- combs that are many years old.
Steve Sheppard: “We always knew that wax was a place where things can accumulate. We were caught a little bit by surprise at the extent to which the material can accumulate in the wax.”
Sheppard is now advising beekeepers to replace the brood combs inside beehives on a regular cycle, even though that's expensive to do.
He says an antibiotic exists for the newly discovered fungal infection, but it's not yet known when to give it to the bees.
Produce opportunities in foodservice – report
(fastcasual.com) – Nearly three out of four restaurant operators (72 percent) said emphasizing fresh produce in their marketing efforts drives more customers to their restaurant, according to new research presented at Produce Marketing Association’s (PMA) 2009 Foodservice Conference & Exposition, July 24 in Monterey, Calif.
Additionally, 46 percent of restaurant operators said they look for fresh produce items that their customers can not buy at their supermarket.
The study was conducted by the National Restaurant Association and PMA as part of a joint project that also included the International Foodservice Distributors Association (IFDA). The research highlighted foodservice operators' focus on produce’s expanded options, sourcing and food safety.
"Our new research lays the foundation to move forward with our collaborative efforts to indentify new opportunities to serve our guests more fresh produce options on restaurant menus nationwide," said NRA president and CEO Dawn Sweeney. "Nutrition and food safety are key issues to our industry, and working with the produce and distributor industries will enhance both."
Other report findings include:
* 67 percent of restaurant operators wish they had more options regarding fresh produce selections
* 60 percent of operators said they wanted more information on how to incorporate fresh produce on their menu.
* 41 percent said they expect to serve more fresh produce in the next two years, while 56 percent said they expect to serve about the same amount.
Food safety remains a top priority for restaurant operators.
* 89 percent of operators said they are willing to pay more for their fresh produce if its safety is guaranteed
* 76 percent of operators said they are willing to pay more for fresh produce if it is traceable all the way up the supply chain
The research set the stage for the "Executive Think Tank: Summary and Discussion" at the PMA conference July 25 featuring top executives from across the supply chain. A closed-door "Executive Think Tank" was held July 24, at which senior foodservice and produce industry leaders reviewed the operator research, prioritized forces that could make the greatest difference on the use of produce in foodservice and identified strategies to help the supply chain address those priorities.
During the session, produce and foodservice industry leaders set a goal to double the use of fresh produce in the foodservice sector over the next 10 years, and identified five strategies for doing so. The strategies are:
* Re-imagine the restaurant experience, with produce having a stronger presence and telling its story from field to fork;
* Increase consumer confidence in fresh produce, including product safety, trust and integrity;
* Demonstrate social responsibility, balancing the needs of people, the planet and profitability;
* Foster closer collaboration among the industry sectors, including operators, distributors and grower/shippers; and
* Foster closer collaboration with government and other stakeholders.
A report summarizing the operator research and think tank’s recommendations will be published by the associations and distributed to their members this fall.
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