Food Safety, Farming, and the Front Page

In the first eight months of this year, the political focus on Capitol Hill, and in the White House, has been on a few familiar, front-page items: the economic stimulus, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, climate change legislation, and lately, whether and how to reform health care.

But if you flip a few more pages, past the section one headlines, there is clearly also an emphasis on the intertwined issues of food safety and antibiotic resistance. And the dairy sector has a great deal riding on how these interrelated topics are addressed in Washington.

Of those two issues, food safety has gotten the most attention. This recent article in the Washington Post illustrates how the series of recent outbreaks of foodborne illness, including E. coli in cookie dough earlier this year, is galvanizing the Obama Administration to crack down on what it sees as holes and flaws in the regulation of food production. As I had predicted in this space five months ago, the cookie dough, peanut, and all the other contaminated food scares of the recent past, have convinced lawmakers to act.

The good news is that because of the rigorous series of hygienic practices that dairy farmers engage in, plus the sanitation standards at processing plants, the impact of any changes in the offing should be minimal. We will continue to fight to make sure that farms themselves are not assessed financially to help pay for the additional inspectors that will be part of a stronger future Food and Drug Administration. If anything, additional enforcement activities by the FDA directed at food imports, including foreign dairy products, have the potential to be a net positive for the image and competitiveness of U.S. dairy farmers.

The other current, big push by the FDA is to crack down on the use of antibiotics in livestock. Top FDA officials, such as Josh Sharfstein, the #2 person at the agency, have recently gone on record in support of ending the non-therapeutic use of antimicrobials in food animals. Key leaders in the House and Senate have taken similar positions, basically on the assumption that it’s the misuse of antibiotics in animals that is helping spread antibiotic-resistant germs in people. For dairy, the stakes are significant because it could eliminate the use of medicated calf replacer, and/or dry cow treatment.

Both practices contribute to healthier animals, and have an impact on milk quality, but both fall in the gray area between treating active infections, and using pharmaceutical products to promote growth. And those uses of antibiotics are the types of practices that official Washington is looking at eliminating. That’s why NMPF signed a letter last month to the White House, urging the Obama Administration to think hard before it removes the ability of farmers and ranchers to use these products – all based on an unproven assumption that using such drugs in livestock creates more dangerous pathogens in the food supply.

Given the activist orientation in Washington these days, it’s entirely possible that the specific attempt to legislate away the sub-therapeutic use of antibiotics may be woven into the larger food safety bill that Congress is likely to enact. In fact, a lot of the push to eliminate the use of pharma products on farms has less to do with food safety, and more to do with economics.

There’s this implicit assumption that these products are used by large farms, not small ones, and that this is a big vs. little, factory vs. family farm dynamic. That’s certainly not the case in dairy, but too often in Washington, public policy battles are waged with symbols rather than facts, and are fought in two dimensions, instead of three. Such portrayals are not always accurate, but they do make for attention-grabbing headlines these days.

National Milk Producers Federation

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