New Congress may simply starve food-safety bill to death [VIDEO]
by Bonnie Azab Powell.
Many sighed with relief when the lame-duck 111th Congress
pulled itself together and, like passing a Capitol-sized kidney stone, finally
got the ill-starred,
much-discussed Food Safety Modernization Act done and signed into law by President Obama last week. At last, the nation’s food safety laws will
get their first update in decades: the FDA will gets the authority to mandate
food recalls, plus legions of new inspectors, and the power to raise the standards
for imported foods, among other things.
The bill comes with a $1.4 billion price tag—chump change
in federal budget land. But even that seems kinda like overkill for the safest
food supply in the world, says Rep.
Jack Kingston (R-Ga.), the incoming chair of the Agriculture subcommittee of
the House Appropriations Committee, which has jurisdiction over the FDA. In this
interview [video below] for Eye on FDA, a blog by a pharmaceutical industry
lobbyist, Kingston blithely questions whether the FDA really needs any more
power, and whether that’s too much money for the agency to absorb efficiently.
After all, private companies do a heckuva job policing their own products. After all, it’s not good for business to be sickening and/or killing people, says Kingston.
[If I were Grist’s Dave Roberts, I’d embed
a sound file here of tires SQUEALING and brakes SCREECHING, but you’ll just
have to imagine it.]
WTF? Really??? Yes, folks, the much-compromised-on food safety bill, having survived
countless
attempts to kill it from both Democrats and Republicans, may simply get starved
to death by the 112th Congress.
Watch and weep:
Related Links:
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Massive gingerbread house recall a reminder that food safety starts in the gut
Food safety bill passes House, skates to prez’s desk at last
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