Buying Local: The Safety Issues in Farmers’ Markets “Farmers’ markets are great.... One day they’re going to kill some people, though.”156 Galen Weston, the Chairman of Loblaw, the Canadian grocer, offered this assessment in his speech at the 2012 Canadian Food Summit. Mr. Weston’s speech was the beginning of a year of concern and proposed and promulgated regulations related to the sale of fresh produce. Exempt from federal, state, and local regulation, the local produce market has been growing because of the ease of entry and lower costs of regulatory compliance. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention concluded in 2013 that produce such as fruits and vegetables accounted for 46 percent of the 4,589 food-borne illness outbreaks linked to a specific commodity between 1998 and 2008.157 At the top of the list were leafy greens. A 2013 similar FDA analysis found that leafy produce resulted in 131 outbreaks (including Salmonella, E. coli, Hepatitis A, and Cyclospora) between 1996 and 2010 that resulted in 14,000 illnesses and thirty-four deaths. In the summer of 2012, the Salmonella-infected cantaloupes from a farm in Indiana affected all growers and caused all melon growers to experienced significant losses because of one farm’s shoddy operations. Farmers’ markets have gained popularity in the past decade because of a sustainability movement to buying locally, a practice touted as reducing dependence on oil because the transportation of produce is not necessary. Support for local, small farmers was seen as a step toward local sustainability. However, the small farmers and their marketplaces have escaped regulation and inspection. In some states, the extent of regulation is making sure that the farmers at the local farmers’ market are indeed local, and not misrepresent- ing their local status. Also, regulators check to be sure that the food was grown locally and that local farmers have not imported it from elsewhere. In California, the regula- tions just require that the produce be kept six inches above the ground.158 As a result, Congress passed the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), called the most sweeping safety reforms in seventy years.159 The FSMA imposes growing standards, packing requirements, inspection procedures, and record-keeping requirements through administrative rules designed to track food from farm to table so that the outbreaks can be reduced, tracked, and, hopefully, prevented. However, the law exempts from federal stan- dards and regulations any farms with less than $500,000 in food sales for the past year, a threshold that results in an exemption for 80 percent of the farms. As a result the farmers’ markets will not be subject to the new food safety standards, and larger farms and produce sellers will have price increases because of the compliance standards the FSMA imposes.
1. Explain the stakeholders in the farmers’ market movement, and discuss the risks associated with this sustainability movement.
2. If you were a small farmer who was exempt from the FSMA, would you voluntarily comply with FSMA standards? Explain your answer.
3. How will the FMSA affect the sale of produce?