We would like to update our farmer colleagues and our local customers on the many food safety issues that will affect us this year.

Over the past several years, a food safety certification program was quickly cobbled together by commercial companies such as Primus Labs to take advantage of the hysteria that grew out of the E. coli outbreak in packaged spinach.

This farm inspection-based program was quickly adopted by the large retail grocery chains like Safeway, Costco and hotels and restaurants to force local farmer compliance.

It has had the opposite effect, certifying only 0.5 percent of our farms and excluding the rest from their markets shelves and your home kitchens.

The new Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) directs the FDA to develop science-based preventives of food-borne illness and apply them to producers throughout the entire food system, including farms. This FSMA will also exempt many small farmers from regulation because they pose much less risk than huge mono-cropping combines.

But that exemption will not solve our problems of corporate-mandated barriers, or over-regulation by anti-farmer extremists imbedded in our state institutions. There are already more than a dozen new "food safety" bills, plus a half-dozen 2011 carry-over bills that will impose even more regulation on farmers, resulting in less local food and more imported food on grocery shelves.

But why farms? Farmers have grown safe food for the past 4,000 years, and their farms are not the epicenter of food-borne illness. Yet, from spinach to peppers to cantaloupes, the media hype initially portrays farms as the sources of these contaminations. The fact that contamination was introduced at the processing plants and not the farms never makes it back into the news.

Farms are biological systems, not sterile laboratories, so we do not autoclave our shovels. It is the American fascination with processed, quick, ready-to-eat packaged foods that comes with the much higher risks for contamination than produce direct from our farms.

Last summer Hawaii’s small farmers had to organize a near-revolt to oppose the additional food safety regulations that were passed last session under HB 667. This groundswell resulted in the governor vetoing that bill.

Now, Hawaii’s farmers have reorganized — this time to define their own food safety legislation that will protect consumers and farmers from inane and unnecessary over-regulation.

Farmer and consumer stakeholders, led by the Hawaii Farmers’ Union and the Hawaii Farmers’ Safe Food Alliance, met and agreed, without equivocation, that the existing market-biased program misses the mark on safe farms and that we need a locally designed and managed safe farm program based on the same 4,000-year-old practices of clean hands, clean water and clean soils.

This coalition drafted the principles for new legislation under HB 2065 that will enable the state to design and manage a safe farm program to provide a better strategy and a better choice for small farmers than either the federal or Primus programs.

It meets not just the needs of the retailers and Big Ag, but also those of Little Ag — our local farmers and local consumers.

It is based on four simple yet significant differences from the existing market- biased system:

» Science-based identification of pathogens, their sources and preventions.

» A farmer education and training program in good agricultural practices.

» Risk analysis for differing crops and cultivation practices.

» Consumer education on handling fresh and packaged produce at home.

We believe HB 2065 is the only bill that does not commingle other issues but focuses on a state standard for a practical, proven, effective and efficient safe farm program; and that it alone incorporates our state’s goals for food sustainability and self sufficiency while guaranteeing both our farmers’ rights to grow wholesome food and our consumers’ rights of access to that food without barriers.