Criminalize Organic Farming? H.R. 875 & S. 425

House Resolution 875 has been called an attempt to ban organic farming.

In it's own words, it is: "To establish the Food Safety Administration within the Department of Health and Human Services to protect the public health by preventing foodborne illness, ensuring the safety of food, improving research on contaminants leading to food-borne illness, and improving security of food from intentional contamination, and for other purposes."

That sounds all very fine and dandy, does it not?!  I will use a post from the Prison Planet forum to help me with my point on this topic.  Zed says the bill:

• Legally binds state agriculture depts to enforcing federal guidelines effectively taking away the states power to do anything other than being food police for the federal dept.
• Effectively criminalizes organic farming but doesn't actually use the word organic.
• Effects anyone growing food even if they are not selling it but consuming it.
• Effects anyone producing meat of any kind including wild game.
• Legislation is so broad based that every aspect of growing or producing food can be made illegal.  There are no specifics which is bizarre considering how long the legislation is.
• Section 103 is almost entirely about the administrative aspect of the legislation.  It will allow the appointing of officials from the factory farming corporations and lobbyists and classify them as experts and allow them to determine and interpret the legislation. 
• Section 206 defines what will be considered a food production facility and what will be enforced up all food production facilities.  The wording is so broad based that a backyard gardener could be fined and more.
• Section 207 requires that the state's agriculture dept act as the food police and enforce the federal requirements.  This takes away the states power and is in violation of the 10th amendment.

Quite a reaction to a seaminlgy harmless bill that seems to want to just protect the public from any more food scares such as the spinach E.coli outbreak.  At the time of that spinach scare a few years ago, I happened to work for a software company that designed and distributed food distribution management software to suppliers of meat, produce, seafood and a plethora of other food item distributors.  There are already stringent controls in place and complex tracking systems that can track, not only end product food items, but the ingredients within those food items, back to the source of origin.   There are several food recalls announced on the FDA website almost everyday, yet many of them do not make the headlines.  So why the big deal about the spinach and the more recent tomato incident? 

Could it be, in conjunction with H.R. 875, a gradual attempt to root out organic farming and/or impose stricter controls?  This video suggests that the bill could put organic farmers out of business.  The bills are sponsored by agriculture giants Monsanto (* see below), Cargill, Tysons, ADM and will dictate what to feed the animals, how to medically treat them and, what toxic sprays to use.  Watch the video...

This is bordering on nationalization of the food industry, and could easily take the impact as far as regulating what we grow in our own back yards.  This is insane.  If you care about what you eat, grow, and your liberty to do that, call your representatives and demand that these bills are stopped.

* Monsanto is the world's largest genetic engineering corporation, i.e. they produce genetically modified foods.  It is a huge global industry that has not supplied adequate research information on the health effects of GM foods.  Again, more on that another day!