From: Keith Addison <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Reply-To: sustainablelorgbiofuel@sustainablelists.org
To: biofuel@sustainablelists.org
Subject: [Biofuel] U.S. Government's Plan to Protect You From
TerroristLivestock
Date: Wed, 19 Sep 2007 21:44:55 +0900
http://www.alternet.org/rights/62858/
U.S. Government's Plan to Protect You From Terrorist Livestock
By Jim Hightower, Hightower Lowdown
Posted on September 19, 2007, Printed on September 19, 2007
A friend of mine tells a story about the political demise in the
1950s of an entrenched Oklahoma state representative, whom we'll call
Elmer Goodenuff.
Rep. Goodenuff, who chaired the ag committee, had been in office so
long that he'd grown tight with the capitol crowd, but he had lost
touch with the folks back in his rural district. Thus, when some
supermarket lobbyists asked him to sponsor a bill requiring that all
egg producers be regulated by the state and have to pay an
egg-grading fee, he saw no problem with the measure. It was for the
public's health, the lobbyists told him. His constituents, however,
did have a problem with it. In those days, many small farmers made
their spending money by selling eggs fresh out of their chicken yards
-- yet here was ol' Elmer hitting them with a bureaucratic rigmarole
and a fee that would make their little egg stands more trouble than
they were worth. It turns out that the supermarket lobbyists' real
agenda had been to get rid of all these bothersome mom-and-pop
competitors.
Suddenly, the chairman found himself facing political opposition -- a
young lawyer from the home district had filed to run against him.
Shortly afterward, the two candidates came together for a debate at
the county fair. The lawyer spoke first, limiting his talk to only
three sentences: "Hidy folks, I'm so-and-so, and I'll make you a good
state representative. If you give me the chance, I'll fight for you
... not for the special interests. Now I yield the balance of my time
to Mr. Goodenuff, so he can explain his egg bill to you." Still
clueless, Elmer did try to explain it, but his explanation was hardly
good enough -- the more he talked, the more votes he lost. His egg
bill retired him.
Chicken trackers
I expect that many of today's state legislators and Congress critters
-- Democrats as well as Republicans -- are going to experience their
own Goodenuff comeuppance if they continue to go along with special
interests pushing a new regulatory program that is presently roiling
rural America into a full-tilt revolt. This is yet another of those
sneaky programs blindly authorized under the screaming banner of
"homeland security." It has received practically no mass-media
coverage, but I'm sure you'll be excited to learn that the National
Animal Identification System (NAIS) sets up a whole new surveillance
program to defend you and yours from a rather odd national security
threat: terrorist chickens. And terrorist cows, horses, pigs, sheep,
llamas ... and so on. Advanced under the benign guise of protecting
public health from outbreaks of animal-borne diseases, this program
is intended to tag and track every farm animal in America from birth
to death.
It is, to say the least, intrusive. NAIS would compel all owners of
such animals to register their premises and personal information in a
federal database, to buy microchip devices and attach them to every
single one of their animals (each of which gets its very own 15-digit
federal ID number), to log and report each and every "event" in the
life of each animal, to pay fees for the privilege of having their
location and animals registered, and to sit still for fines of up to
$1,000 a day for any noncompliance.
This is Animal Farm meets the Marx Brothers!
It would be one thing if this were meant for the massive factory
farms run by agribusiness conglomerates, which account for the vast
number of disease outbreaks. After all, they have corporate staffs,
computer networks, and existing systems of inventory tracking. But no
-- rather than focus on the big boys that cause the big harm, NAIS
targets hundreds of thousands of small farms, homesteaders, organic
producers, hobbyists ... and maybe even you.
Me, you shriek?! Yes. If you keep a pony for your kids or board a
couple of riding horses, if you've got a few chickens in your
backyard, if you've got a potbellied pig or a pet goose, if your
youngsters are raising a half-dozen ducks as part of a 4-H club
project, if you maintain a buffalo or a goat just for the fun of it
-- indeed, if you have any farm animals, NAIS wants you in its
computerized grasp.
Every farm, home, horse stable, or other domicile of these animals
would have to have its address and precise GPS coordinates filed into
the system's central computer, along with the name, phone number, and
other personal data of the owner/ renter of the premises. Owners of
the animals would have to tag every one of them (luckily, fish ponds
are not included!) with an approved tracking mechanism -- most likely
by implanting radio-frequency ID chips into them.
Then comes the burden of logging and reporting the "events" in each
animal's life. These not only include sales and deaths, but also any
movement of the animals off the registered premises, including taking
them to a vet, going to a horse show, presenting them for judging at
the county fair, trucking them to another farm and participating in a
roundup or sporting event.
This is far more onerous than the burden put on owners of guns and
autos, the only two items of personal property presently subject to
general systems of permanent registration. Gun owners, for example,
can take their guns off their premises (to go hunting, attend a gun
show, or just carry them around) without filing a report with the
government. But NAIS would deny this freedom to chicken owners! The
authorities are declaring hens to be more dangerous than a Belgian FN
Five-SeveN handgun, and every time Hen No. 8406390528 strays from her
assigned GPS locale, NAIS autocrats would require her owner to report
within 24 hours the location, duration and purpose of her departure
-- or be subject to a stiff fine.
Cui bono?
One would guess that Orwell, Huxley or Kafka came up with this
absurdity as a work of satire, but unfortunately it's all too real.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) first published a "Draft
Strategic Plan" for NAIS in April 2005, setting forth its intention
to make the program mandatory by federal law. In June 2006, the USDA
issued an implementation document setting a goal of having 100
percent of premises registered and 100 percent of animals tagged by
January 2009. Rep. Collin Peterson, a Minnesota Democrat who chairs
the House Agriculture Committee, is pushing NAIS in Congress, and
there's also an effort to impose NAIS piecemeal by getting state
legislatures to pass it. Already, USDA has spent about $117 million
trying to get NAIS off the ground.
To find out who's driving this, we have to ask the old Latin
question, Cui bono? (Who benefits?) That takes us to another obscure
acronym, NIAA, which stands for the National Institute of Animal
Agriculture. Despite its official-sounding name, this is a private
consortium largely made up of two groups: proponents of corporate
agriculture and hawkers of surveillance technologies. They are the
ones who conceived the program, wrote the USDA proposal, and are
pushing hard to impose it on us.
Such industrialized meat producers as Cargill and Tyson have three
reasons to love NAIS. First, the scheme fits their operations to a T,
not only because they are already thoroughly computerized, but also
because they engineered a neat corporate loophole: If an entity owns
a vertically integrated, birth-to-death factory system with thousands
of animals (as the Cargills and Tysons do), it does not have to tag
and track each one but instead is given a single lot number to cover
the whole flock or herd. Second, it's no accident that NAIS will be
so burdensome and costly (fees, tags, computer equipment, time) to
small farmers and ranchers. The giant operators are happy to see
these pesky competitors saddled with another reason to go out of
business, thus leaving even more of the market to the big guys.
Third, the Cargills and Tysons are eager to assure Japan, Europe and
other export customers that the U.S. meat industry is finally doing
something to clean up the widespread contamination of its product. A
national animal-tracking system would give the appearance of doing
this without making the corporations incur the cost of a real
cleanup. The health claims of NAIS are a sham; NAIS backers assumed
they could sneak their little package of nasties past the people
before anyone woke up. Wrong. Because it does not touch the source of
E. coli, salmonella, listeria, mad cow and other common meat-borne
diseases. Such contamination comes from the inherently unhealthy
practices (mass crowding, growth stimulants, feeding regimens, rushed
assembly lines, poor sanitation, etc.) of industrial-scale meat
operations, and NAIS will do nothing to stop these practices.
Moreover, tracking ends at the time of slaughter, and it's from
slaughter onward that most spoilage occurs. NAIS doesn't trace any
contamination after this final '"event" in the animals' lives.
Which brings us to the chip companies and sellers of computer
tracking systems. In addition to such brand-name players as
Microsoft, outfits with names like Viatrace, AgInfoLink, and Digital
Angel are drooling over the profits promised by the compulsory
tagging of all farm animals. The USDA figures there are more than two
million premises in the United States with eligible livestock. There
are 6 million sheep in our country, 7 million horses, 63 million
hogs, 97 million cows, 260 million turkeys, 300 million laying hens,
9 billion chickens and untold numbers of bison, alpaca, quail and
other animals -- all needing to be chipped and monitored. And, as new
animals are born, they need chips, too -- a self-perpetuating market!
Amalgamated into the NIAA front group, these money interests
established a task force in 2002 "to provide leadership in creating
an animal identification plan." The group had already been promoting
the idea for months, using fears of disease outbreaks and
bioterrorism to put a sheen of respectability on their intentions and
to gain endorsements from America's corporate dominated agriculture
establishment. In essence, this small, private group of profit
seekers developed a self-serving plan that will affect millions of
people and got the USDA to adopt it whole, with practically no public
participation.
Revolt!
With the unveiling of its 2005 strategic plan, however, the USDA got
way more public participation than it wanted. Quicker and hotter than
a prairie fire, word of this corporate driven, bureaucratic
monstrosity spread throughout the countryside, and NAIS
instantaneously became the most hated initiative in rural America.
Meetings were held, rallies were organized, research was done,
websites sprang up, blogs raged, Paul Reveres rode, groups formed,
lawyers leapt into action -- and the rebellion was on!
Stunned, the establishment took a step back. The 2005 plan said NAIS
was mandatory, but in November 2006, the USDA rushed out a revision
declaring NAIS would be voluntary and that the feds would let states
take the lead in implementing the system.
Wary farm activists, however, noted a qualifier in USDA's
declaration. NAIS was to be "a voluntary program at the federal
level." Activists were right to be on guard, for the ag establishment
has been going all out to make the program mandatory at the state
level, pushing state legislatures to require participation. Indiana,
Kentucky and Wisconsin have already made registration compulsory, and
efforts are underway to do so in Maine, North Carolina, Texas and
Washington.
Even without legislation, states are being encouraged by USDA to use
coercive measures to enroll farms and ranches in NAIS. One way is to
make people's participation in various popular government programs
(disease management, conservation, etc.) contingent upon registering
their premises in the federal NAIS database. Some people are even
being told they can't take animals to shows or have their kids join
4-H unless they register.
Another technique is even more crude -- enroll people without their
knowledge. This is done by mining data from other agencies and
merging it into NAIS computers. In an agency report last year,
Massachusetts' agriculture commissioner bragged, "We've had great
success in integrating the records of municipal animal inspectors
into a database for premise registration. While you may not know your
premise ID number yet, if you were visited by your animal inspector,
you should be in our database." (This is the same guy, by the way,
who says it's time to require chickens to be raised indoors.
"Tolerance for outdoor poultry will become zero," he proclaimed.)
Once registered in NAIS (voluntarily or surreptitiously), you're
pretty much stuck there. Until April, there was no procedure at all
to opt out of the system, and the one they offer now leaves it up to
USDA -- not you -- as to whether you can get your name, premise and
animals out of the database. As USDA puts it, a request for removal
must be submitted to your state's top NAIS official, "who'll decide
whether to authorize the request." So much for "voluntary."
What USDA can't get by coercion or subterfuge, it's trying to get
with cash. Our cash. So far, it has laid out $6 million in grants
(some dare call them payoffs) to livestock industry organizations and
others to front for NAIS by hyping it and running sign-up campaigns.
In June, for example, the Future Farmers of America youth group was
given $600,000 to entice its 7,200 local chapters into promoting
premise registration in classrooms and at FFA events -- with awards
offered to chapters that do the best.
Fighting back
Despite its underhanded tactics, its war chest filled with our tax
dollars, and its deceitful rationales, the ag establishment still
hasn't been able to hang NAIS around our necks. As one farmer put it,
"This thing's so stinky, I wouldn't pull it behind my tractor with 40
feet of rope." Like Bush's Social Security privatization scheme, this
proposal profits too few at the expense of too many, and the more
people learn about it, the less popular it will be.
While the media barons have mostly missed (or ignored) this story,
grassroots forces --especially small farmers -- have done a
phenomenal job of spreading information, rallying opposition,
confronting politicians who've been going along with such a gross
intrusion into our freedoms -- and winning converts.
For example, in Wisconsin, which was the first state to require
farmers to register their premises in NAIS's database, the sponsor of
the bill now opposes the program. Rep. Barbara Gronemus, a Democrat
from a rural district, says she was duped. Appalled by the way it's
being implemented and by the financial squeeze it puts on family
farmers, she says, "I could just kick myself for putting my name to
it now."
In at least 11 states, legislation has been introduced to reject the
program, and in Texas and Vermont, aggressive grassroots opposition
has forced legislators to back off plans to mandate premise
registration. I also know some urban Democrats in Congress who had
been supporting NAIS on the assumption that it was a consumer
protection program. They've since had "visits" from agitated home
folks who helped them see the light. Such visits are producing
results. This summer, the House Appropriations Committee pointedly
refused to approve any new funds for NAIS, instead demanding "a
complete and detailed strategic plan for the program, including
tangible outcomes ..." Incredibly, NAIS has gone as far as it has
without ever having been subjected to a cost-benefit analysis! At
last, the committee has now declared that without being shown some
real benefits of such a sweeping ID system, it "has no justification
to continue funding the program."
This is a big change in congressional attitude. However, billions of
dollars are at stake in getting NAIS implemented, and the profiteers
form a powerful lobby that will keep pushing at all levels, by all
means. To hold them off requires more of us to learn what they're up
to and to join the grassroots rebellion against them. You might not
own a chicken or a cow, but you do own some fundamental freedoms that
NAIS subverts in its pell-mell pursuit of special-interest profits.
Some good people are standing up for those freedoms -- check the "Do
Something" box to find out what you can do to help.
From "The Hightower Lowdown," edited by Jim Hightower and Phillip
Frazer, September 2007. Jim Hightower is a national radio
commentator, writer, public speaker and author of Thieves In High
Places: They've Stolen Our Country and It's Time to Take It Back.
© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/62858/
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