Who's Paying for All This New Food Safety (Hint: It's you... twice)

The new food safety legislation passed by the Senate last week that will have a revolutionary impact on the way that food is tested, and inevitably produced, in America, will also have a mindboggling price tag.

The Omaha World-Herald, a great paper for agribusiness stories by the by, quotes the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) as estimating the cost of the bill at $1.4 billion over the next five years.

One point four billion. With a “B.”

And that’s just the government’s tab.

While no estimates have been made, or in all honestly could reasonably be made, of what the new legislation will cost the businesses who make the food that need to be inspected under the newly intensified strictures demanded by the bill, we can only expect it to be enormous.

And, whatever the number, it will most definitely be passed on to the consumer in the end.

The bill calls for unprecedented FDA oversight on all food inspections nationwide, which will demand an increase in FDA facilities to handle the extra workload. The Senate debate (or lack thereof as the bill was passed with an almost 3-1 margin) circled around the recent outbreak of deadly food-borne illnesses in a number of foods, namely eggs, that were responsible for a few deaths over the summer throughout the country.

Senators seemed enamored of presenting the bill as a health crusade that would “save lives” and help the government offset a health care cost associated with food-borne illnesses that the CBO also wagered a guess at, coming up with a figure of $152 billion.

While the government investment of $1.4 billion seems like a no-brainer investment to offset that huge healthcare number, it looks paltry and “spun” when put in contrast with the amount that implementation of the bill will cost businesses and, inevitably, the American consumer.

Doing anything to raise the cost of food (even imported food, per the language of the legislation) during the climb out this recession while simultaneously suspending unemployment benefit extensions to the most desperate Americans and asking them to pay tax dollars into a $1.4 billion government program that their government can't afford during this historical budget crisis, feels less-than savory to us humble editors at “The Biz.”


And the cost to on-the-margins, smaller fine food purveyors will inevitably be draconian. Off the top of our head, we have to speculate that this bill will have some real-life impact on the "Locavore" market.

Meaning, we hope you have budgetary wiggle room for that locally-sourced duck confit you like so much...