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BILL OF THE WEEK
HB 433/SB 290 - Dept. of Agriculture
and Consumer Services (FL Farm Bill)
This week, we are taking a look at SB 290 and its House companion HB 433, both titled Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, but referred to as the "Florida Farm Bill." The bill is a sweeping update to Florida agriculture, with provisions ranging from preempting county governments from using gasoline-powered landscape and farm equipment to increasing potential fines for unlicensed pest control. However, the reason that the bill has sent alarm bells ringing across the state is the provision dealing with the “Disparagement of agricultural food products" or Florida’s “food libel law."
This bill represents a drastic change to the current state of the law as written. Food libel laws were written to provide a mechanism to prevent defamation for perishable goods. The thinking behind that is if you have a perishable product, say a harvest of apples or a shipment of beef, there is a clock ticking on how long those products can be sold on the market before they go bad.
In that scenario, if someone makes defamatory claims about your product, by the time the dust settles and the air clears, it may be too late to sell the product. In order to fight this, food libel laws were created. They take the high bar for a defamation claim in our court system: A "provably false statement" made with "actual malice" and lower it to a "false statement" that should have been known to be false. By lowering the bar to these claims, food libel laws help to protect food producers.
These laws were enacted after a 60 Minutes report in 1989 questioned the safety of apples treated with the preservative Alar, causing apple sales to fall sharply. Because of the high standard of proof in defamation cases, the growers were unable to prove their case in court. Given the perishability of their product, they successfully lobbied for a relaxed standard for "food libel."
Nine years later, food libel laws were in the news again when Oprah Winfrey had a guest on her show and discussed the beef industry and "mad cow disease." Following comments on her show, the beef industry initiated legal action, and although they were unsuccessful, the trial dominated the media cycle.
Florida’s current food libel law provides many of these protections, but they all hinge (as in most food libel laws) on the goods in question being perishable. This presents a problem for the sugar industry, which produces a shelf-stable product. The set of proposed bills strikes the word "perishable" and replaces it with "agricultural," meaning it would apply to sugar. This would mean not only that statements against the product could result in a court date, but also that any false statements or questioning of the practices surrounding its production could. Therefore, advocates speaking out against practices they see as harming their communities, whether from air and water pollution or harm to local ecosystems, could find themselves in court and on the hook for attorneys' fees.
This bill represents an assault on the First Amendment right to free speech that all Floridians are entitled to. By expanding the law beyond perishable goods, the original arguments for needing the relaxed standards fall away. Instead, we are left with another attempt to make people think twice before fighting for solutions to clean our air and water, which our communities and ecosystems rely on. The Senate version of the bill is set to be heard on Feb. 10, and we will be closely watching this bill as it develops.
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