FDA Food-Safety Rule Webpage Repeatedly Crashes in Advance of
Important Public-Comment Deadline
Individuals and Organizations Unable to Enter Feedback
as November 15 Deadline Looms
Cornucopia Requests Extension
Family-farm and consumer advocates have been working for weeks to
ensure meaningful public comment on the
FDA's
proposed food-safety rules. Now the government
website that serves as a portal for the public's comments on food
safety is offline, out-of-service, or even refusing to accept
comments.
"This is potentially disenfranchising thousands of farmers and
consumers, and is flat-out unacceptable," says Will Fantle,
Codirector of the Wisconsin-based Cornucopia Institute. "We have
been working for months, as have many other organizations across
the country, to raise public awareness of the Food Safety
Modernization Act (FSMA) and the proposed rules developed to
implement it. With the public-comment period set to close on
November 15, we have received numerous reports from our members
that they cannot send in timely comments because the portal for
doing so, regulations.gov, is not working."
The FSMA was passed by Congress in late 2010 after anger
boiled over following years of food-poisoning outbreaks, associated
with dangerous fecal pathogens, that impacted peanuts, spinach,
sprouts, melons, and imported foods. The FDA's draft rules,
however, saddle local and organic family-scale farmers with
unnecessary and expensive prevention practices more appropriate for
riskier industrial processing and distribution systems. And
the draft rules fail to address a health-control strategy for the
primary source of many of the fecal-generated pathogens --
industrial-scale feedlots and livestock facilities.
This message has been sporadically reported by members of the
public for the past several weeks and now appears to be the
standard case for anyone attempting to access the webpage.
At other times, citizens have reportedly been advised to
resubmit any comments they might have posted while other visitors
to the website, in November, were greeted with a message that
"planned system maintenance" was being conducted and would be
completed by August 6.
"In light of this ongoing barrier to public comments, we believe it
is incumbent on the FDA to fix their webpage problems immediately
and then extend the public-comment period for another 30 days
thereafter," said Fantle. In a letter dated today, sent by
mail to Michael R. Taylor, the deputy commissioner for foods at the
Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Cornucopia formally requested
the extension. "These rules threaten to drive many
family-scale farmers out of business, and they and the consumers
who buy their fruits and vegetables deserve to be heard so that the
FDA can make needed changes."
This is not the only time that the federal government's
public-comment portal has experienced difficulties.
Cornucopia has noted in the past that individuals seeking to
provide feedback on proposals affecting the USDA's National Organic
Program and its National Organic Standards Board have encountered
similar website-availability issues. The farm policy
organization has directly relayed those observations to officials
during public meetings. Yet little appears to have
changed.
"We intend to file a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request
this time inquiring about the problems associated with the FDA's
food-safety comment page screw-up," added Fantle. "We are
very interested in understanding more about the nature of this
problem and if it was created by a contractor working for the
government -- maybe even the same contractor/contractors that have
been implicated in the debacle concerning the government's health
care website."
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MORE: The government's website was down all day yesterday
(Monday, November 11) and is still down this morning. For
instructions on submitting comments through snail mail please see
the current
action alert on the Cornucopia Institute
website:
http://www.cornucopia.org/fda-online-comment/.