09/29/08 Pear Bureau Backwards & Forwards

Pear Bureau Backwards and Forwards. I'm Greg Martin with today's Fruit Grower Report. Kevin Moffitt has been busy and will just get a little busier as the pear crop is being harvested across the northwest. Moffitt oversees the Pear Bureau Northwest and it is his responsibility to make sure the pear industry is well represented and that you and I and the rest of the world keep buying pears. MOFFITT: I have just returned from a USDA meeting last week and prior to that I was in Washington DC the week before at a United Fresh meeting which is sort of the lobby group that keeps track of all of the issues regarding the farm bill and immigration and food safety and this is a meeting where a lot of groups like ours go back to Washington DC and we meet with our elected officials to provide them with input into the concerns about a lot of those issues. And what are those issues? MOFFITT: The top issues that we were talking about back there was this is a great farm bill that was just passed. It has a lot for the specialty crop industry, a lot more than we've ever had before but there's already some implementation issues and we were talking to the Congress about insuring that all of these programs are implemented. Immigration is a huge topic and continues to be so. Moffitt says they are pushing for a good guest worker program and of course there's the food safety issue. MOFFITT: We're probably going to have some real changes once the new Congress gets put together and we want to ensure that different crops are looked at differently in terms of food safety. Not everybody has the same risk factors. Products like pears and apples and cherries that are grown on trees will not have the same risk factors as product that is grown on the ground. That's today's Fruit Grower Report. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.