OLEAN -- Fine. I admit it. I'm not as quick or as smart or as knowledgeable as I used to be.
Until I wrote last week about the unconscionable and continuing slaughter of American horses for foreign food due to the United States Department of Agriculture's stubborn flouting of congressional intent, this city slicker had never even heard of the latest boneheaded bureaucratic plan now brewing at USDA.
In line with the federal government's penchant for alphabet designations, this intricate little brainstorm is called the NAIS -- innocent-sounding enough until you learn that it turns 230 years of national tradition, agricultural enterprise, domestic security, individual property rights, adherence to the Constitution and American privacy rights upside down.
NAIS stands for National Animal Identification System. It might turn into NBC, the Next Big Controversy.
The huge federal cabinet agency has already spent $85 million trying to develop NAIS.
If put in place, it would require every premises in the nation that houses even a single chicken, duck, turkey, cow, bison, deer, elk, ostrich, game bird, goose, pig, goat, sheep, horse or any other animal considered to be livestock (or fit for human consumption) to be registered in a computerized government database, assigned a unique seven-digit number and given a listed GPS (global positioning system, aided by satellite navigation) coordinate. Such properties would be subject to unannounced federal or state agricultural inspections at any time, no search warrants necessary. The owner of the premises likely would be charged a fee for this "registration."
The next step would require each and every animal, individually, to be tagged with a radio frequency identification device, or microchipped -- like veterinarians now do to allow tracking of missing pets. Each animal would get a 15-digit ID number. The owner of the premises would probably be charged for installation of these nifty little gizmos.
Then, movement of the tagged animal from the registered premises -- any movement whatsoever -- would have to be reported to the USDA or a similar state agency within 24 hours. No exceptions. None.
If NAIS goes into effect, even parakeets and canaries -- any kind of "exotic fowl" under federal definition -- would probably come from the pet store with a microchip ID device.
Think of some scenarios.
Kindly grandma gives her poor elderly neighbor a chicken for the stew pot from the half dozen she keeps, mostly as a reminder of her youth on the farm. Gotta report it, grandma.
Little Billy takes his well-groomed calf to the county fair, wins a blue ribbon, then returns home. Gotta tell the feds, Billy.
Stockbroker George likes to ride horseback on weekends, so he bought an old circus horse and keeps it stabled outside of town. This Saturday, a nice trail ride is scheduled in a nearby state park. Law-abiding stockbroker George will co-mingle his horse with other mounts, so he'll have to tell the federal or state record keepers about his trail ride.
Little Jennifer transports the handsome turkey she has raised to the pre-Thanksgiving meeting of the local 4H Club to show off for her annual project. Then she takes the big, beautiful bird back home. Uh oh, aren't you forgetting something, Jenny? That's right, you've got to notify the USDA before you go to school tomorrow.
"This program will devastate county fairs, and 4H, and Future Farmers of America projects," said Texan Randy Givens, one of the founders of the Liberty Ark Coalition, a national group recently formed to keep American farms from "unnecessary government intrusion."
Givens, quoted on the excellent Web site www.eco.freedom.org, notes another likely unanticipated fallout from this scheme: "It will kill the rodeo circuit. These programs have been successful for generations. The NAIS will wipe them out because it is simply not worth the effort, or cost, to register, tag, and report every animal that moves to a show or a county fair, or to a rodeo."
There is no federal statute, as yet, that authorizes such electronic tracking of individual animals. The two or three bills that contained such language and were introduced in the previous session of Congress languished in committee.
The USDA on its own Web site lists NAIS as "currently a volunteer program," but quickly gathering opponents believe this term is designed to lull into complacency those it would affect.
"The (NAIS) program would be enforced, possibly with fines and even criminal penalties," insists another founder of the Liberty Ark Coalition, Ohio attorney Karin Bergener. "The USDA has said that the program is currently voluntary, but if 100 percent of all farmers don't volunteer to participate, USDA will make it mandatory."
The USDA insisted as recently last week -- to the Wall Street Journal -- that it never was totally committed to mandatory participation, and for about a year now has been leaning toward a voluntary system, administered for enforcement through various state agriculture departments. Some big farm states, such as Minnesota and Wisconsin, have already set up advanced premises registration programs.
But as one scrolls farther down the USDA Web site, one discovers the huge federal agency still admitting in typical bureaucratese that "the draft strategic plan references mandatory requirements in 2008 and beyond."
In the meantime, USDA has taken "a phased-in approach to implementation" and assigned its Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service to publish updates on the establishment of NAIS as a working program. And USDA has a good leg up on making all this happen. The agency has already registered for GPS, on a voluntary basis, about 270,500 "agricultural premises" nationwide -- roughly 18 percent of the total farms or livestock-harboring locations in the country.
"If it isn't mandatory, it simply will not work," Bobby Acord, head of the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service until two years ago, and now a consultant to the National Pork Producers Council, warned in the Wall Street Journal in June.
So, how did all this get started?
Mad cow disease. Then, Big Health and Big Food entered the fray.
Mad cow -- or bovine spongiform encephalopathy -- spreads from cow to cow via contaminated feed. Most scientists believe humans can get the brain-wasting illness from eating infected beef and can die from it. The disease became lodged in the typical American consciousness in the 1990s. In the last decade or so, about 150 humans have died from it, none of them from meat linked to the United States.
In late 2003, the first American cow was identified with the infection, and the Ag Department went bonkers, pledging to quickly develop a national tracking system. A couple of others have been found with mad cow since, the most recent one a beef cow in Alabama that tested positive three months ago. Despite visiting three dozen farms and five auction houses in that state, the USDA couldn't even discover where the Alabama cow was born or what happened to its possibly vulnerable herd mates.
The idea of a national food-animal tracking system also gained crucial momentum when the near-panic over avian flu occurred last fall and winter, despite the lack of proven human-to-human transmission or discovery in the United States. If human-to-human bird flu contagion ever evolves, tracking poultry movement will have very little to do with the outcome.
The idea of a national animal ID system, set up electronically, goes back to the early 1990s, when new data-storing technology companies were pushing their wares. In 2002, the National Institute for Animal Agriculture -- which sounds like an educational group, or think tank, or public interest organization -- proposed the actual NAIS that USDA is working on today. But the NIAA is anything but an academic or public affairs organization. Its membership is filled with huge agribiz companies and suppliers -- Cargill, Tyson, Monsanto, the National Pork Producers Council, etc.
They had NAIS on the road before the first case of mad cow infection was discovered in the United States. So much of Big Agribiz loves this idea -- in the same fashion that big restaurant chains quietly supported and lobbied for the late-night passage of New York state's no smoking-in-eateries act here. Big chains could take the hit of smokers staying away, but mom-and-pop restaurants couldn't, because smokers at the bar provided their profit margin. They've been folding ever since.
It's the same with the big meat and poultry producers. Most of them have industry representatives on the "working groups" USDA has established to develop the NAIS plans. If the costs of maintaining a huge federal tracking database fall upon the shoulders of small farmers and family producers, they'll probably just go out of business. Score one for the big guys.
Another argument being advanced for NAIS is that in this day of globalization, big beef exporters need to be able to point to their meat product's pedigree -- where it came from, how it was handled, whether it was exposed to anything. Australia is already selling us beef with tracking system credentials. Phooey, say the NAIS opponents, this is Big Business hand-in-hand with Big Government.
"Only a handful of large companies will profit from the export market," writes Judith McGeary, an Austin, Texas, commercial litigation attorney who is executive director of the Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance, a national group fighting NAIS. "Meanwhile, the costs of the program will drive small producers out of business, enabling large companies to increase their control of agriculture and contributing to higher prices for consumers as competition is eliminated."
Gee. You don't think the big beef companies could have thought of that already, do you? Surely not.
McGeary also notes that most food-borne illnesses are from bacteria and viruses that contaminate food due to "poor practices at slaughterhouses" or in subsequent food-handling. "NAIS will do nothing to protect against these problems," she points out. "The tracking ends at the time of slaughter, so it will not add to the government's ability to trace contaminated meats once they are in the food chain. ... If we want to address disease, we need to address the causes of disease in the large commercial facilities, not unnecessarily burden our small and medium-size farmers and ranchers."
Many farm activists and animal groups believe the federal NAIS movement is simply designed to make it easier to conduct wholesale killings of suspected disease carriers -- like the British did in unnecessarily torching whole herds of cattle when mad cow broke out in the 1990s on that sceptered isle, instead of using existing technologies to track down the susceptible individual cows and steers through DNA blood markers. It's easier. Why do the work? Besides, the animals all look alike, don't they? That's what happened in our Southwest in 2003 when the Exotic Newcastle Disease outbreak occurred on several poultry farms -- a disease brought into the country by way of illegal Mexican fighting roosters that the Border Patrol should have nailed.
Terry Watt, an animal activist who still lives in Arizona, remembers the draconian response of the federal government and believes the NAIS plan is "to set them (farmers and animals) up for 'depopulation' should some sort of disease show up in their region. ... The feds were 'depopulating' people's backyard chickens and ducks without even testing for the disease. I was in a quarantine area in Mohave County, Arizona, and believe me, no one wanted anyone to know they even owned a pet parrot."
So, here's the root analysis against NAIS. The rationale for this huge developing program is to protect against animal disease by providing quick traceback of all animal movements. But as the Liberty Ark Coalition points out in their formative document (www.libertyark.net), the primary flaw in the federal thinking is that "the threat of disease cannot justify every intrusion into our privacy and property rights. Disease, both human and animal, has been part of our existence for millennia. The government's and industry's attempt to use fear to deprive us of our rights is unacceptable."
The secondary flaw, says Liberty Ark, is that actually tagging and tracking the animals -- all the animals -- "would dwarf any government program in existence. The costs will roll downhill to the smallest producer and individual animal owner. There are no provisions for USDA to offset the staggering costs of this national program."
The USDA would answer that it is already picking up some of this cost through grants for setting up NAIS reporting programs. Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns announced just two weeks ago that the USDA will soon award $14.3 million to properly applying Indian tribal governments and various state ag departments "to continue registering premises for the national animal identification system."
I have three thoughts on all this:
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | July 3 2006 |