Nothing sweet about pro-industry food bill

Give New Hampshire's feisty agricultural commissioner credit. Steve Taylor has found a most dramatic argument to make the case against the proposed National Uniformity for Food Act. It's maple syrup.

The National Uniformity for Food Act is one of those measures that periodically pop up in Congress to give the conservatives' game away. We generally hear a lot around election time about conservatives believing in state and local control. States, we're told, can be laboratories for constructive change. Let a million flowers grow. Down with big government. That sort of thing.

But conservatives' admiration for state and local initiatives often disappears as soon as states and localities do something conservatives and their campaign contributors don't like. Then we get federal laws such as the No Child Left Behind Act and the proposed National Uniformity for Food Act, which proposes to prohibit individual states from regulating food purity and consumer information.

In Alaska, there's a requirement to identify which salmon is farm-raised. In Michigan, certain foods made with sulfites have to carry allergy warnings. In Minnesota, the alcohol content of candy must be printed in a certain way on the labels. In California, labels on bottle water must disclose the arsenic content.

Some customers want to know such things. The requirements respond to a perceived need, as do the shellfish safety standards in 16 states, the individual milk safety laws of the 50 states, and so on.

But all this information and all these laws and rules are a pain in the neck for the food industry. So last March, the House of Representatives rode to the rescue by passing this bill, with the enthusiastic support of New Hampshire Congressmen Jeb Bradley and Charlie Bass.

The bill is now before the Senate, where it is co-sponsored by U.S. Sen. Judd Gregg. If it passes there, consumers will be at the mercy of generally weaker, and more often nonexistent, federal standards. One rule fits all. Maybe no rule.

True, the bill says states could still petition the Food and Drug Administration, item by item, to retain their more stringent requirements. That's the same remedy the Bush administration recently offered the states when it wiped out the roadless rule for near-wilderness federal lands. But item-by-item appeals are ruinously expensive. And, in the current Washington climate, success is unlikely - witness the bulldozers warming up on the borders of public lands.

The attorneys general of 39 states -including New Hampshire's - oppose the National Uniformity for Food bill. So does Consumers Union, which calls it "uniformly bad for consumers." Not surprisingly, the bill is also opposed by the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture, which is where Steve Taylor comes in. The other day he noted that our state law requires that anything labeled "New Hampshire maple syrup" be derived entirely from maple-tree sap and have nothing added to it.

"If our law gets preempted," he told the Union Leader, "you could put corn syrup in it for all I know. It's just outrageous."

That was a strategic gambit of the highest order. Maybe New Hampshire voters won't get riled up about farm-raised salmon or alcohol-enriched candy, but adulterated maple syrup? That's something every Granite Stater should understand.

A food industry lawyer quickly disputed Taylor's charge, as did Gregg. But the point has been made. This bill seeks to wipe out hundreds of state food-safety and food-purity laws and regulations - maybe even the law that protects the sanctity of New Hampshire maple syrup.