Testimony - Tomato grower Greg Murray

Find the statement of Georgia tomato grower Greg Murray here from the Sept. 17 hearing on this year's salmonella outbreak investigation by the House agriculture appropriations subcommittee. Here is an excerpt, recalling some of the more painful moments for growers:

We are appreciative FDA established a list of ‘safe states’ that were identified as not being a part of the outbreak and tomatoes from those states were safe to consume. Georgia was included on the very first ‘safe list’ but most consumers were afraid of any kind of tomato. Each day the CDC and FDA were announcing more salmonella cases had been reported. The messages were confusing. Consumers could not understand the reported salmonella cases were from product consumed three to five weeks ago, not product currently on the market. So the safest thing for a consumer, or a food outlet, to do was just not purchase or consume tomatoes.

Over the next four weeks tomato sales and prices at Murray Farms dropped to almost non-existent. We left half of our crop in the field because we could not sell it. For those tomatoes we could sale, the price dropped to as low as $2.00 per box rather than a normal year at more than $12.00 per box.

The fact that Georgia tomatoes were never implicated as having a problem, did not matter. With prices at $2.00 a box, we finally threw in the towel and left over 1.5 million pounds of tomatoes in the fields to rot. This many tomatoes would have fed 90,000 Americans for a year.

This incident has been a severe financial hardship to our farm. We expect to lose over $2 million of income, not profit, due to this food safety scare. This $2 million loss is money that we need to pay for our production costs such as, mulch, fertilizer, pesticide, irrigation and labor to harvest those acres we did pick.

In addition to the loss of income to our farm, one of our main concerns is the loss of consumer demand for tomatoes this fall and next spring. We have reduced our fall crop by 50% for fear the consumer will not return to tomatoes in the fall.

Later, Murray gave recommendations to the subcommittee.....

I am here today because I want to be a part of the solution. I hope the information offered in my testimony will help this sub-committee address this serious problem and keep another ‘false food safety awareness fiasco’ from happening again. The following recommendations are offered to this subcommittee and supported by the Georgia Fruit and Vegetable Growers Association:

1. First, I ask for you to take swift action to pass a mandatory food safety program nationwide based on commodity risk that will insure our food supply is safe. To restore consumer confidence, it is critical to the entire produce industry that FDA adopts such a mandatory policy for tomatoes and other produce, based on the risk factor for that product. Any guidelines should take into consideration regional production differences, product risk levels, and not be a one-size-fits-all. In addition FDA must look to the industry for input and consultation in the development of these policies.

2. Second, I ask you to require FDA to develop a plan of action that demands state and federal agencies to work together with industry so their future responses will not become another ‘false food safety awareness fiasco’. FDA should put forth a plan detailing how agencies and industry can work together and prevent another economic disaster like this last Salmonella saintpaul outbreak. Such cooperation would have been helpful back in May, June and July when tomatoes were the false target. In order to move quickly to solve the problem and identify the illness source, full cooperation with a transparent process must be developed in advance of future outbreaks. A model could be the Investigation Team at an airliner crash site assembled by the National Transportation Safety Board. No public statement is made until the ‘cause of the crash’ has been determined.

And thirdly, I ask for swift passage of HR 6581 which will partially compensate farmers for some of their losses due to the food safety scare caused by the federal government. We believe Congress should provide relief to growers and shippers in Georgia for the real losses we suffered and we will continue to suffer at no fault of our own. We believe we are in the same situation as growers of other commodities whose crops were destroyed by a natural disaster.