Long-Stalled Food Safety Bill Advances in Senate

(Nov. 17) -- The Food Safety and Modernization Act, a comprehensive overhaul of the power of the FDA and USDA to regulate food safety, cleared a major hurdle today after spending more than a year stalled on the Senate floor.

In September, it seemed that the bill was dead after last-minute opposition from Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., but now the lame-duck session has voted to break the filibuster and move ahead debating the controversial bill.

The bill has sparked fierce debates on a number of fronts, but with the Senate's 74-25 vote for cloture, those can't last for more than 30 more hours before the Senate brings the bill and its amendments to a vote.

The measure, S. 510, would increase the Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture's power to set inspection standards and issue recalls for tainted food. Public health advocates have long argued that this sort of legislation is necessary to reinforce what they see as a largely ineffective regulatory structure.

"There's a significant systematic risk in the food system and no adequate response to it," Tom Philpott, agriculture editor for the environmental blog Grist. "It's obvious, clear and there."

"Passage of the bill would be the most important advance in food safety since FDA was created in 1906," former FDA Associate Commissioner William Hubbard told ABC News.

But a more robust FDA won't come cheap, and in the current fiscal climate lawmakers are looking over any bills to increase spending with tight scrutiny. In September, Coburn also argued that the country would be better served by making the FDA and USDA more effective at their current jobs before burdening them with new responsibility.

Republican lawmakers like Coburn also have some unlikely allies in the sustainable food movement, where a number of "locavores" oppose the bill because they're afraid that they'll be unnecessarily subject to the same harsher standards as much larger operations.

Many small-farm advocates support the Tester-Hagan amendment, which would exempt small producers from most of the new regulations. But there is a strong libertarian streak in the movement toward small farms and local agriculture, and some are wary of any measure increasing the FDA's power.

Many supporters of the Tester amendment argue that the real purpose of the bill should be to close up the sorts of systemic risks inherent to very-large-scale agriculture, and that smaller operations with tight feedback loops that sell directly to consumers just aren't as dangerous as large operations like the egg farm that had to recall 380 million eggs in August because of possible salmonella contamination.

But small farms can make people sick just like large farms, and larger food concerns like the American Meat Institute oppose the Tester amendment, arguing that it would undermine America's faith in food safety as a whole if all producers were not held to the same standards.

The other amendment receiving attention concerns banning endocrine disruptor Bisphenol-A from food and drink containers.

The long history of tension over the bill combined with the new urgency placed on it by the movement to cloture will likely make for intense debate, but the outcome remains uncertain.