OLYMPIA, Wash. — The Washington Department of Agriculture wants to enforce a new national food safety law, providing the federal government pays for it.

Kirk Robinson, WSDA assistant director, said the department suspects farmers and food processors would prefer to be checked by state rather than federal inspectors.

“We have a good relationship with our farmers and processors,” Robinson said. “I think we have a good history of being a regulator and partner of our industry.”

Robinson on Tuesday updated the state House Agriculture and Natural Resources Committee on the Food Safety Modernization Act.

For more than three years, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has been writing rules to carry out the act, which President Barack Obama signed in January 2011.

The law is intended to prevent food-borne illnesses, which annually sicken 48 million Americans, hospitalize 128,000 and kill 3,000, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Supporters also say the law will prevent businesses from being linked to economically devastating public health and public relations disasters. Also, the law may help safety-conscious food handlers compete with less-conscious, cost-cutting competitors.

The law’s provisions include sending U.S. inspectors to check practices in foreign countries that bring food into the United States.

The FDA is expected to put in place rules for produce growers and processors in July. Rules regulating other agricultural sectors are expected to be imposed over the following year.

Robinson said he believes the FDA will have to rely on states to oversee much of the law’s implementation. The FDA has estimated enforcing the law will cost $400 million to $450 million a year. Congress, so far, has balked at raising the money through user fees.

“We definitely see us having a very key role in implementing (the law),” Robinson said in an interview after the committee meeting. “We’d love to, as long as there are funds to support that.”

To go onto farms and into food processing plants, WSDA inspectors will need new authority from the Legislature.

The agriculture committee’s chairman, Brian Blake, D-Aberdeen, said he may want to withhold that authority until the final federal rules are released.

“We don’t know what the inspectors need access for,” he said.

Blake also said he doesn’t want to set up a state inspection program only to have federal regulators override the WSDA’s interpretation of rules.

“If local control is just a farce, I have a problem with that,” Blake said.

Several House ag committee members said they feared the rules will be unreasonable. Some members said they were concerned farmers will be required to test water quality nearly every time they irrigate, even for crops with no history of being contaminated by waterborne bacterial diseases.

Rep. Ed Orcutt, R-Kalama, said farmers probably won’t be able to pass along the costs associated with complying with the law.

“I’m worried not only about food prices going up, but that a lot of the cost actually is going to be absorbed by the farmer,” he said.

Shelton Democrat Kathy Haigh, a veterinarian, said the law goes too far in trying to keep crops germ-free, depriving humans the chance to build their immune systems.

“I feel very strongly we are going way overboard,” she said.

The Northwest Food Processors Association’s vice president, Connie Kirby, said the association supported the food-safety act.

The rules will require all food processors to meet practices that are already standard, she said.