Tom Harkin: “we are rapidly approaching the final vote on the Food Safety Modernization Act. For the first time in seven decades, the…”

“we are rapidly approaching the final vote on the Food Safety Modernization Act. For the first time in seven decades, the Congress has addressed this issue. It has taken several years to get to this point. We have had involvement from Republicans and Democrats, from the business community, and from the consumers groups. It is widely supported by both the business sector and the consumer groups. We have had good bipartisan support on this bill with Senator Enzi and others on our committee. This is the product of a long effort to reach the compromise we needed to get good legislation through. The vote we are about to have now is on a substitute offered by my friend, the Senator from Oklahoma. This substitute would basically kill all of this work we have done. It eliminates a lot of the provisions we have in this bill, such as the preventive control provisions that I think is one of the most important parts of this bill, to get preventive measures in and to prevent the contamination of food in the first place. It also eliminates the important trace-back provisions that we have in this bill that we have worked on on a bipartisan basis. It would eliminate the important foreign supplier verification provisions which say they have to verify that the food coming into this country is the same as this. I ask Senators to reject the substitute.”