Source: http://bereagardens.blogspot.com/2013/
Timestamp: 2017-06-29 14:17:49
Document Index: 521730817

Matched Legal Cases: ['§ 503', '§ 503', 'art 503', 'art503', 'art 205', '§ 205']

Berea Gardens.... Agriculture Issues: 2013
FDA Barely Considers Biological, Chemical and Radiological Inputs in Proposed Produce Rule By
Violating the explicit language of the Food Safety Modernization Act (FMSA), the Food and Drug Administration’s
(FDA) Proposed Produce Rule gives a complete pass to imported vegetables grown with sewage sludge, contaminated to various degrees with heavy metals, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, volatiles, flame retardants, pharmaceuticals, steroids, hormones (1,2) radiologicals (3) and undescribed contaminants. At the same time, the Proposed Rule makes it more difficult for U.S. organic farmers to use compost. It’s amazing.
In cities such as Detroit, Milwaukee, Los Angeles and Boston, and, indeed, around the country, there is increasing use of land for produce production that has been heavily impacted by urban and manufacturing chemical hazards. North Carolina Cooperative Extension, for example, has
a guide to avoiding hazards in urban soils (6).
Will Allen of Growing Power, Inc., a Milwaukee-based Midwestern urban
farming and community development project with a 20-year history, has the position that (7, and see 8): “…urban gardeners must grow their own soil, and use that soil to grow food.” Existing urban soil, he contends,
is far too contaminated to risk growing food in. When you dig in urban areas, he says, ‘All you’re doing is stirring up lead, arsenic, all the bad guys in the soil. And the food takes up the contaminants.’”
“For example, if an untreated human waste (i.e., equivalent to domestic septage: “liquid or solid material removed from a septic tank, cesspool, portable toilet” (40 CFR § 503.9(f)), is applied to a field used to produce a food crop, then “Food crops with harvested parts that touch the sewage sludge/soil mixture and are totally above the land surface shall not be harvested for 14 months after application of sewage
sludge” (40 CFR § 503.32(c)(1), cross-referencing § (b)(5) of the same section). We agree these standards are appropriate for protecting public
health and, therefore, we are not proposing to implement further restrictions.”
“The producer must manage plant and animal materials to maintain or improve soil organic matter content in a manner that does not contribute
to contamination of crops, soil, or water by plant nutrients, pathogenic organisms, heavy metals, or residues of prohibited substances.”
The Organic Farming Production Act has a simple and clear regulation on sewage sludge (12): “The producer must not use sewage sludge (biosolids) as defined in CFR 503.” This would have been a simple and enforceable rule for FDA to adopt for all produce.
Foreign production of fruits and vegetables that are imported into the United States has to meet the same or equivalent standards, as the U.S. rules,. FDA seems to have ignored the consequences for foreign production in its handling of sewage sludge. Since FDA proposes a low bar to use of sludge, one would expect foreign producers and governments
to easily hop over that bar. They won’t have to petition for an alternative set of standards that are equivalent in safety. They can just use the U.S. produce regulations to justify sewage sludge in produce production for U.S. consumers, if not for their own consumers.
Finally, there is a major issue of the interactions between chemicals
and consequences for human health. Both David Acheson, in his Food Safety News
interview (13), and the National Research Council (14), in their 2002 review of EPA’s sludge rules (CFR 503) raise similar concerns. The levels set by EPA and others are done singly for each contaminant and source by source. But the human population is exposed to complex mixes of contaminants from multiple sources over extended periods of time. FDA’s Proposed Rule is silent on these issues as well.
FDA focused on biological contamination. Did they do a good job on human pathogens in soil inputs to farms, at least? Unfortunately, no. They did not.
There seems to be something else going on in the way the Proposed Rule is structured and in its analysis of relative risk and hazards of different inputs and practices.
(5) Daniel B. Cohen. Comment on: Standards for the Growing, Harvesting, acking and Holding of Produce for Human Consumption. Proposed Rule Document issued by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Docket No. FDA-2011-N-0921 Regulatory Information Number RIN 0910-AG35.
(6) CR Crozier, M Polizzotto and L Bradley. Soil Facts: Minimizing Risks of Soil Contaminants in Urban Gardens. North Carolina Cooperative Extension Service, http://www.soil.ncsu.edu/publications/Soilfacts/ AG-439-78_Urban_Soil_Contaminants.pdf
(7) Will Allen: Growing Power and the Future of Food [event announcement and description]. Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. March 09, 2012. http://www.jhsph.edu/research/centers-and-institutes/johns-hopkins-center-for-a-livable-
future/news_events/events/past_events/2012/will_allen.html
(8) Growing Power, Inc. Website: http://www.growingpower.org
(9) Nega Beru. Memo on Chemical, Physical and Radiological Hazards Associated with Produce. Memorandum for the Record. Department of Health
and Human Services, Public Health Service, Food and Drug Administration. May 29, 2012.
(10) Code of Federal Regulations, Title 40, Part 503, http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CFR-2012-title40-vol31/xml/CFR-2012-title40-vol31-
part503.xml#seqnum503.11
(11) The Organic Foods Production Act of 1990 (OFPA), 7 U.S.C. Section 6501, et. seq., as amended, is implemented in 7 CFR Part 205, the NOP Final Rule, which regulates the production, handling, processing, and labeling of all raw or processed agricultural products to be sold, labeled, or represented as organic in the United States. The
quote is from § 205.203(c).
(13) James Andrews. IAFP 2013: Interview with Keynote Speaker Dr. David Acheson. Food Safety News. Aug. 06, 2013. http://www.foodsafetynews.com/2013/08/iafp-2013-interview-with-keynote-speaker-dr- david-acheson/#.Ujnb6ha6hz8
FDA to hold first public hearing on GM babies By Rady Ananda
Next month, the US Food and Drug Administration will hold a two-day public meeting
the BPT, “mitochondrial replacement is a form of inheritable genetic modification.” This type of gene therapy is the source of much controversy, because it permanently changes the human genome and risks unforeseeable changes in growth and development, and aging.
Paul Knoepfler, Associate Professor of Cell Biology and Human Anatomy
at the University of California, Davis School of Medicine, commented that:
”Given the current regulatory void in the
United States and the paucity of safety data, allowing scientists to experiment with creating permanent changes to the human genome is a genie that must be kept in the bottle.”