Sat, 19 Jul 2008

Food fears linger even as tomato scare ends

Ya gotta love this quote from the article:

"We live in an age of technology where you can bar-code a banana," said Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill. "We've got to work this through with the industry and come up with something that's reasonable. The more confidence consumers have, the more goods they will purchase."

So, apparently, it's not just livestock that's destined for "complete traceability" - it's every food item. You can be, however, that Dole and Chiquita will probably get an exemption from barcoding every banana - they'll get to mark each container or shipment, since they do "too many" fruits, just like Tyson and IBP will be exempted from RFID tagging every pig or chicken because there's too many ... only the "little people" will have to mark everything, and it'll put us out of business.

And won't that make the big agribusinesses sad ... losing their local competition just when it's starting to pick up and take off.

How is it that people cannot see it: proposals like this are designed by big business, for big business and they benefit big business. Regulation does little or nothing to protect the public from real or imagined dangers, but it does a whole lot to restrict access to markets and lock out new and smaller players from the game.

Capitalism, my ass! This is state socialism a la the Soviets and Cubans, and the cracks are beginning to show in the system, just like they did (and are) in those two failed economies.

AP - The tomato scare may be over, but it has taken a toll — it's cost the industry an estimated $100 million and left millions of people with a new wariness about the safety of everyday foods.

(link) [Yahoo! News: Top Stories]

/Agriculture | 0 writebacks | permanent link

comment...

 
Notes: If you put a <mailto:> link in the URL field your address will not be mangled: this could be a bad idea as your email address could be easily harvested by bots designed for SPAM. The comments field should now format correctly for line feeds and carriage returns: when you hit the 'Enter' or 'Return' keys in your comment it should break to a new line. The text should wrap cleanly. Please let me know if it doesn't. No HTML tags will pass through - entering links seems to be the main cause of comment SPAM. Also, please be sure that Javascript is enabled in your browser before attempting to post a writeback. Sorry for any inconvenience, but this really helps cut down on the amount of comment SPAM I have to deal with.
 
 Name:
 URL:(optional)
 Title: (optional)
 Comments:  
Save my Name and URL/Email for next time