Recently, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) of America revised some of the laws regarding farm food safety. Having proposed the federal Food Safety Modernisation Act, the new act incorporated extensive and various comments from farmers and other relevant organisations. It is said that the aim is to strengthen food safety by focusing more on preventing food safety problems rather than responding to problems after the fact.
Here are some of the changes that are being proposed;
- governing produce safety
- making a safer preventive controls for human food
- making a safer preventive controls for animal food
- establishing a foreign supplier verification
Farmers are most concerned about the preventive controls for human and animal food. They have to begin considering water quality standards and testing, standards for using raw manure and compost, certain provisions affecting mixed-use facilities, and procedures for withdrawing a qualified exemption for certain farms.
What triggered the FDA to produce a revised law was their need to define a farm that harvest crops from another farm as a ‘facility’. The issue was caused by the FDA labelling a single activity as ‘not harvesting’, and farms tat performed that activity would be acting outside the defined term for ‘farm’ (a bit convoluted, right?).
With the new and updated proposal, it would clarify that processors of food for human consumption that create by-products used as animal food, and are already complying with FDA human food safety requirements.
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