Pretend Safety: The FDA's Costly New Rules That Won't Make Our Food Safer
Baylen Linnekin writes at reason of new "food safety" rules the FDA is imposing that will cost small farms about $13K a year and big farms about $30K, with varying fees for other food producers:

But will the proposed rules make America's food supply--already quite safe and getting safer thanks to conscientious farmers, producers, and sellers of all sizes, vigilant watchdog groups, and eagle-eyed food-safety lawyers--any safer?

Before its passage, the FSMA had its predictable supporters in big business, academia, public health, the media, and government.

Another camp--one in which I was a charter member--argued against adopting the rules because they were likely to be costly and ineffective.

For examaple, in a Northeastern University Law Journal article published last year, "The Food Safety Fallacy," I argued that the FSMA would increase the FDA's power and budget but questioned whether the new law would have any impact on food safety.

Now that I've seen the key rules the agency has proposed to implement the FSMA, the facts appear to support my contention. How can I be so confident?

In pushing for passage of the law, the FDA and its supporters billed the law as a necessary solution to a problem of great magnitude.

Indeed, some 48 million Americans suffer from some form of foodborne illness each year--a figure the FDA cites at several of its FSMA web pages.

The agency claims the FSMA will "better protect public health by strengthening the food safety system" and helping to eliminate the "largely preventable" problem of foodborne illnesses.

But if we can largely prevent foodborne illness, we won't have the new FSMA regulations to thank. In truth, the law's real impact on food safety will be minimal.

The FSMA would permit the FDA to hire about 2,000 new food-safety inspectors in order to increase the frequency of food-safety inspections. Specifically, the proposed rules would require that "[a]ll high-risk domestic facilities must be inspected within five years of enactment and no less than every three years, thereafter." Given that the FSMA rules are just now open to public comment and won't be final for another year or two, this translates into a likely total of exactly two inspections of what the FDA refers to as the most "high-risk domestic facilities" over the next decade.

How's that for impact?