An impressive tool to satisfy your inner policy wonk and feed your habit of digging into the details of government activity is GovTrack.us. “GovTrack.us is an independent tool to help the public research and track the activities in the U.S. Congress, promoting government transparency and civic education through novel uses of technology.” This includes the ability to track activity on bills.

I have been utilizing this tool over the past few weeks to get-to-know, H.R. 875: The Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009.

In the face of the ongoing peanut – and now pistachio — salmonella debacle it’s no surprise that consumers are demanding safe food production practices. And the response to the concern is working its way through our nation’s capital.

The bill, sponsored by Rep. Rosa DeLauro [D-CT] and introduced on 2/4/09, seeks to: “establish the Food Safety Administration within the Department of Health and Human Services. The Food Safety Administration’s main goal is to protect the public from food borne illness, improve research on contaminants, and prevent food security from intentional contamination, “and for other purposes”.

Sounds good, right? It depends on who you ask and how you interpret the language of the bill. The chaos of how we currently under-resource the monitoring of food safety is unnecessarily inefficient and a detriment to public health and safety. Streamlining the “authority” of food safety should be better for all who eat. But as fast as the bill seemingly hit the congressional rounds an outcry from small farm and organic advocates began charging through the URLs –“HR 875 will outlaw small farms”, and “Organic agriculture will be outlawed, farms will be seized!”

Why an outcry from these groups? Isn’t one of the inherent benefits of a certified organic system (with few exceptions) greater attention to detail of the food production system? Don’t small farms and organic supporters want a safe food system? Yes. And yes. But they also want a food safety bill that is definitive in scope and language.

One of the mandates of the Food Safety Administration will be to “implement a national system to identify the food products posing the greatest public health risk. Does that mean peanuts processed amidst mouse and bird droppings? Or does that also mean crops grown without the use of GM seed and conventional pesticides? Sound far-fetched? Maybe not. Post-9/11 a roster of individuals and groups who vocally opposed GMO was quietly aggregated. Their concern for the integrity of seed and soil became equated with anti-American activity and a threat to our national security.

Language in the bill identifies the Food Safety Administration as the overseer for the “development of consistent and science-based standards for food”. In this case the concern is whose science? Those working on peer-reviewed research on organic might say that the deck is unfairly stacked against “organic” science by the lobbying efforts and sheer dollars of large food companies and conventional agri-business. Additionally, the bill identifies that the Administrator (of the Food Safety Administration) will establish “advisory committees that consist of representatives of scientific expert bodies, academics, industry specialists, and consumers.” Again, the concern is that these advisory committees will be heavily-weighted towards the interests of those companies and organizations that have the lobbying power and the dollars to influence.

Finally, is the concern that the bureaucracy surrounding keeping food safe (standards, traceability requirements, and record-keeping) will be created in the context of large-scale food and ag operations , and without the participation of small producers and organic advocates – making it impossible for these groups to comply no matter how ardent they are to do so.

It’s not just organic folks who are looking for the emperor’s clothes. The Food Safety Administration will be led by an Administrator appointed by the President of the United States for a term of five years. Is inconsistent leadership for an organization whose aim is to provide consistency in food safety inherently a problem? And the boil hasn’t even begun over what HR 875 will mean to foreign trade and those countries needing to meet the new food safety compliance.