Local Food Policy Update
Wes King
It’s been a busy last several months on the Local food and farm policy front. Here in Illinois at the General Assembly, this coming Friday is the deadline for substantive legislation to pass out of the original chamber it was introduced in. As usual, most of the thousands of bill that have been introduced in both the Illinois Senate and Illinois House of Representatives haven’t made it this far and even fewer bills will make it through the whole process to the Governor’s desk.
In order to make a less than transparent and not so easy to follow process a little more manageable, every spring Illinois Stewardship Alliance develops bill tracker listing all the various food and farm related pieces of legislation introduced each year, the status of that legislation and Illinois Stewardship Alliance’s position. That bill tracker can be found attached to this email. Also if someone is interested in getting involved with our policy advisory committee that reviews and decides positions on all the legislation I track, please let me know and I can tell you more about it.
With that said, I wanted to provide a few highlights and a disappointment:
- HB2468 - the Cottage Food Expansion Bill, sponsored by Rep. Mike Tryon passed the Illinois House of Representatives unanimously on Friday April 17. HB2486 now heads to the Senate where it will be sponsored by Senator David Koehler. If passed by the Senate and signed into law by the Governor, HB2486 would expand where cottage food products can be sold to include on-farm, farm-stands and CSAs (no longer just farmers markets) for cottage food products where the signature or featured ingredient was produced on farm. HB2486 would also increase the gross sales limit, authorize the IL Farmers Market Task Force to develop an expanded list of allowed products and a few more small but important changes. It also includes an exemption from food handling laws for charitable organizations doing bake sale fundraisers.
- HB2487 – the Seed Library Protection Bill, sponsored by Rep. Bob Pritchard unfortunately will not be making it past this Friday’s deadline. The Department of Agriculture had concerns regarding exempting interpersonal seed sharing and seed libraries from Illinois’ Seed Law. In the end the Department wanted to have regulations and rules for seed libraries, rules and regulations that went well beyond the kind of minimal oversight Illinois Stewardship Alliance and some of our partners thought were appropriate and justifiable. Highlighting the need for increased grassroots level engagement in legislative efforts, we were not able to move the bill forward over the Department’s objections. Next year we plan to take another bite at the proverbial apple but we are going to need a lot more help to make it possible. Stay tuned for more information about how you can get involved in the effort, to protect interpersonal seed sharing from government intervention.
- HB3830 – Co-op Law Modernization Bill, sponsored by Rep. Will Guzzardi, is on track to make it past the Friday deadline and on to the Senate where Senator Scott Bennet will be the sponsor. HB3830 will modernize Illinois law governing food co-operatives which was written 100 years ago in 1915, making it easier to start and structure co-ops including permitting the formation of worker co-ops.
Spring is here and before you know it summer will be too. And while most school districts in Illinois will be off for the summer, just as classes wrap-up, Congress will be ramping up debate around school feeding programs.
At the end of September the Child Nutrition and WIC Reauthorization Act or the Child Nutrition Reauthorization (CNR) act for short will expire. The CNR authorizes a long list of nutrition and feeding programs including: The National School Lunch Program; the Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC); The National Farm to School Program; and WIC Farmers Market Nutrition Program among others. Congressional action around CNR is one of the issues at the top of Congress’s agenda this summer.
A lot of the media and political attention around this legislation will be focused on how many school districts have struggled financially to meet the new standards included in the last CNR, with some schools reporting an uptick in wasted meals as students struggle with accepting new healthier foods after decades of being served high calorie, low nutrition foods that were loaded with sugar and salt. At the same time, the debate around the CNR is an opportunity to support local food and farms, support the growing farm-to-school movement, and help combat the growing obesity epidemic. The CNR structures and funds the national USDA Farm to School grant program, a woefully underfunded program that has helped schools and organizations across the country develop farm to school programs, linking students and farmers through education and local food procurement.
Recognizing the positive impact farm to school programs have for farmers, kids, and communities, as well as the role they have played in helping schools meet the new nutrition standards, a bipartisan cadre of Senators and representatives have introduced the Farm to School Act of 2015 with the purpose of having the bill’s provisions included in the CNR when it is debated and passed later this summer. The Farm to School Act of 2015 was introduced by Senators Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Thad Cochran (R-MS), and by Representatives Jeff Fortenberry (R-NE) and Marcia Fudge (D-OH) to expand the USDA’s successful Farm to School grant program by tripling funding for the program and expanding eligibility to include after school and summer feeding programs. If the Farm to School Act of 2015 were included in the CNR it would be a huge boost to farm to school efforts here in Central Illinois and all across the country.
Interested
in helping to support farm to school efforts? Please call Illinois’
junior U.S. Senator Mark Kirk and ask him to co-sponsor S.569 the Farm to
School Act of 2015 (Kirk's # 202-224-2854) and let him know “with farm to school programs kids win,
farmers win and communities win!”
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"Local Food Matters"