State regulation of leafy greens stalled

SACRAMENTO - State Sen. Dean Florez is hoping a little legislative detour will help build momentum for his stalled bills seeking to regulate the lettuce and spinach industry.

The three measures were introduced in February after officials linked leafy green vegetables from the Salinas Valley to E. coli outbreaks last year that killed at least three people and sickened about 300 nationwide.

The bills would have prohibited growers from using certain practices that could result in contaminated produce, such as placing portable toilets in the fields or using uncomposted or untreated manure as fertilizer.

They also would set up a field inspection program, establish a code system to trace and recall potentially contaminated produce and give the California Department of Public Health a primary role in implementing the legislation.

Supporters of the bills see the Department of Public Health as a tougher enforcer than the state Department of Food and Agriculture.

The bills passed the Senate but stalled in the Assembly in June following an acrimonious hearing in the Assembly Agriculture Committee. The committee rejected one of the measures, 5-2, and did not vote on the other two.

Florez is planning to bring the bills back next year and ask Assembly leaders to send them first to the Health Committee, a more liberal panel that also had been scheduled to consider the legislation.

Approval by the Health Committee would send the bills back to the Agriculture Committee “with a little more momentum,” said Florez, a Democrat from Shafter.

But even with that push, the bills face a tough challenge. The Agriculture Committee is dominated by lawmakers from the Central Valley and is chaired by Assemblywoman Nicole Parra, D-Hanford, a Florez rival.

Florez calls the panel “a captured group of individuals, the worst of the special interest committees.”

“The tea leaves seem to say that the only way to get it out of Assembly Ag is if the whole nation is sick and (more) people die,” he said.

Parra was on a trip to South Africa and was unavailable for comment, her staff said. But the Agriculture Committee’s vice chairman, Assemblyman Doug La Malfa, R-Richvale, said Florez’s characterization of the committee was “hysterical.”

“Every committee in the Legislature is captured if you want to put it that way, especially on the majority (Democratic) side,” he said.

La Malfa, a rice farmer, favors a voluntary marketing agreement set up by state’s leafy green vegetable processors and shippers in conjunction with the Department of Food and Agriculture.

It requires processors and shippers who sign the agreement to sell produce grown under a set of best-practice standards intended to prevent contamination. That includes requiring buffer zones between vegetable fields and potential sources of contamination, such as feed lots, and testing of irrigation water.

“Farmers themselves have a very strong interest in making sure they are delivering quality products to market,” La Malfa said. “If we have a hitch in our supply, our market dries up pretty quickly.”

Participants in the marketing agreement are “regularly inspected” by auditors from the Department of Food and Agriculture, said Scott Horsfall, the marketing agreement’s chief executive officer.

He said the agreement is working “exceptionally well,” despite two recalls of California produce since the Agriculture Committee hearing in June.

In August, a Salinas Valley company, Metz Fresh, recalled 8,000 cartons of fresh spinach that had been contaminated with salmonella.

In September, a division of Dole Food Co. recalled one of its brands of bagged salad after a sample taken from a Canadian store tested positive for E. coli bacteria. Two of the types of lettuce used in the Hearts Delight salad mix came from the Salinas Valley.

“The program is designed to minimize risk,” Horsfall said. “We’re never going to eliminate it completely. In both those cases, the companies acted quickly when they realized their problem. The entire industry has stepped up its attention to food safety.”

But Elisa Odabashian, West Coast director of Consumers Union, said the public should not have to depend on a voluntary program for food safety.

“They can say it includes 90 percent of the industry, but if there’s one grower that doesn’t have to comply with the standards, the door remains open for contaminated products,” she said. “Consumers are seldom protected by industry self-regulation.”