from cornucopia.org: Family farm and consumer advocates have been working for weeks to ensure meaningful public comment on the FDA’s proposed food safety rules. Now the government website that serves as a portal for the public’s comments on food safety is offline, out-of-service, or even refusing to accept comments. “This is potentially disenfranchising thousands of farmers and consumers, and is flat-out unacceptable,” says Will Fantle, Codirector of the Wisconsin-based Cornucopia Institute. “We have been working for months, as have many other organizations across the country, to raise public awareness of the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) and the proposed rules developed to implement it. With the public comment period set to close on November 15, we have received numerous reports from our members that they cannot send in timely comments because the portal for doing so, regulations.gov, is not working.”