News from NOFA/Massachusetts
National Animal ID Program Backstops Agribusiness
While Small-Farm System Offers Real Disease Answers
Ben Grosscup
NOFA
NAIS Response Coordinator
The USDA is starting to implement an animal and
premises surveillance system called the National Animal Identification System
(NAIS). The program would put a radio frequency identification [RFID] tracking
tag on all domestic livestock animals and record their movements in a
centralized database. The USDAs justification for this system is to protect
the public from what it calls foreign animal disease threats like mad cow,
hoof and mouth, and bird flu. (www.usda.gov/nais)
These
are real threats, but NAIS promoters are manipulating legitimate concerns to
scare farmers and homesteaders into complying with a misguided system. This new
program would make small farming less economic and reinforce the very
industrial agriculture whose factory farms most exacerbate harmful disease
mutations and outbreaks. Worst of all, the ones that will be hit hardest are
not the cause of these new disease threats: small and sustainable farms are the
most hopeful solution to the very problems NAIS claims to solve.
On
April 25, 2005 the USDA released its NAIS Draft Program Standards (hereafter
Standards), specifying a phased-in implementation that starts voluntary and
then becomes mandatory. In that draft, premises registration would be
mandatory by January 2008 and tagging all livestock animals would be mandatory
by January 2009. The catchwordsvoluntary and mandatorytake sorting out.
New Rhetoric of Voluntary
The Standards quickly attracted a storm of
opposition (http://nonais.org/). Nine months after their publication, the USDA
backpedaled, proving that opposition can be effective. On Jan. 20, 2006, Neil
Hammerschmidt, the USDAs NAIS coordinator, addressed a meeting of R-CALF USA,
which represents cattle producers and opposes the Standards: Today there is no
one working on rules to implement a mandatory program. We want to see what we
can accomplish [on a voluntary basis] through market incentives, and we want to
see what the market desires (USDA backs off on centralized database and
mandatory ID, Tam Moore, Capital Press Agriculture Weekly 27 Jan 2006).
Hammerschmidt downplayed the draconian provisions as merely a draft.
The rhetorical change, however, has not stopped
the USDA from quickly inaugurating the NAIS at the state level. As
environmental reporter for Grist Magazine, Amanda Griscom Little, reports, The
USDAwill likely leave to state officials decisions about whether to make the
program voluntary or mandatory Neil Hammerschmidt, said [to R-CALF] USDA isnt
sure whether it has the authority to impose a federally mandated program that
requires producers to report to a private entity.
In the
meantime, states are moving on their own to put the animal-tracking system in
place. Minnesota and Wisconsin have approved measures that make stage one
[animal premises registration] of the NAIS program mandatoryand Maine, North
Carolina, Texas, Vermont, and Washington are considering similar legislation.
(Old Big Brother Had a Farm 10 Mar 2006, http://www.grist.org/news/muck/2006/03/10/griscom-little/). So, voluntary at the federal level means
that state ag. departments will be charged with implementing the NAIS, and as
Griscom reports, the USDA has already allocated over $60 million to them to do
it.
Market Wont Necessarily Be Kind
But even if the system were to remain
voluntary, many concerns would remain. NAIS could encroach on farmers rights
without necessarily commandeering their animals and enforcing fines. When
Hammerschmidt suggests following what the market desires, we must ask who are
the most powerful actors in the market, and what agricultural models do they
promote?
Even if
NAIS remains officially voluntary, strong trends throughout the livestock
industry to adopt it could drastically change the farm economy. Distributors
could start requiring animals to be RFID-tagged. Consider the influence the
retail giant, Wal-Mart, exerts over entire industries when they exact new
product qualifications. At the same time the USDA and meat industry are pushing
animal-RFID tagging, Wal-Mart is starting to require its biggest suppliers to
tag shipments to some of its distribution centers with [RFID tags] that would
eventually let Wal-Mart track every item that it sells. (What Wal-Mart Knows
About Customers Habits, Constance Hays, New York Times 14 Nov 2004,
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/14/business/yourmoney/14wal.html?ex=1258088400&en=0605d1fc88b8ab98&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland). Not only governments but corporations too
have enormous power to change entire industries.
These
animal diseases should not be thought of as necessarily foreign. This idea
plays on outmoded national prejudices, but it shapes federal policy. U.S.
Department of Agriculture Secretary, Chuck Conner, described the USDAs
strategy to deal with the global threat of bird flu: Attacking the disease at
its source overseas is a main focusWe also have strict importation
restrictions to prevent the spread of the virus in our country and an elaborate
surveillance system in place to monitor our bird populations. (Measures to
counter avian flu issued by USDA, Agrinews 26 Nov 2005,
http://www.agrinewspubs.com/Main.asp?SectionID=1&SubSectionID=207&ArticleID=9400).
But you
cant attack animal diseases somewhere else, build a wall around your own
country, and expect to be safe. Viruses know no borders; they replicate,
mutate, and spread based on immediate conditions. The most conducive places for
viral pestilence are factory farms, which are spreading worldwide, devouring
landscapes from Arkansas to Vietnams Mekong River Delta.
Various
influenza strains have been endemic in bird populations for thousands of years,
but they typically remain benign unless they have an easy opportunity to mutate
into pathogenic forms. As the Canada-based Beyond Factory Farming Coalition
summarizes: In a low-density, dispersed population, such as flocks of wild
birds or backyard chickens, a virus can only survive as a low pathogenic agent.
If a virus happens to mutate into a highly pathogenic form in these
circumstances, it quickly dies out, as it kills all available hosts.
However
in a factory farm situation, perfect conditions exist for a virus to mutate
from a low pathogenic to a high pathogenic form. Thousands of hosts (chickens)
with near identical genetic makeup, all the same age and size, crowded in close
conditions, allow a virus to kill its host, and move onto the next victim with
great speed and ease. And as public health experts warn, these viral mutations
can confer not only greater pathogenicity, but also human transmissibility,
posing dangers of a deadly pandemic.
As the
reputable farmers rights organization, GRAIN, concludes in its February 2006
report, Fowl play: If bird flu is as serious as the [World Health
Organization] says it is, if millions of people could potentially die from an
H5N1 pandemic, then how is it that [the poultry] industry continues to operate
with so little oversight and so much impunity and support from governments?
What people really need is adequate and enforced protection from the
transnational poultry industry. This will take strong and concerted pressure
from civil society, to cut through the hype and hysteria, stand up for
small-scale farmers and backyard poultry and start building food systems that
put people before profits (see link under "Resources").
Why They Want NAIS
The NAIS is designed to prop up a fundamentally
unsustainable industrial agriculture system and increase global dependence on
it even as it fails farmers and consumers the world over. Meat-importing
countries quickly halt purchases from countries where mad-cow or bird flu are
widely reported. Far from rethinking its disease-prone production model, the
meat industry mainly tries to protect its export markets. Unfortunately, the
U.S. is not alone in implementing animal tracking regimes. Similarly invested
in foreign markets, Australia, Brazil, and Canada are clamoring to implement
animal ID.
Reflecting
the meat industrys urgent desire for NAIS, Mark Dopp, counsel to the American
Meat Institute, called the USDAs recent backpedaling on mandatory national
animal ID disturbing: Our position is that mandatory is needed, and its up
to USDA to figure out how to get there All it takes is one incident involving
an animal thats not identified to disrupt meat exports (USDA remarks on
animal ID trigger confusion, anger, Food Traceability Report, March 2006). But
the meat industry talk about protecting its export markets means putting
profits ahead of small farmers and public health.
Farmers Should Not Volunteer for This
If the USDAs Standards are any indication of
whats to come, there will be a two-tiered implementation of NAIS that
encourages massive-scale to the detriment of human-scale farming. Large
industrial operations will more easily incorporate a tracking system by making
just one ID tag for each group of animals kept together for all stages of the
mechanized production process. By contrast, small farmers would be required to
tag each individual animal, a financial burden the USDA says will befall the
farmer. Furthermore, NAIS traces animals back to their farm of origin, not
forward to the consumers. Thus, NAIS increases farmer liability risk and cost
without providing consumer benefits or dealing with the main culprit of these
new disease threats: factory farming.
The USDA wants farmers to volunteer for the new
NAIS program, but that means volunteering away the right to raise animals
without government interference. If we stand up together and say no to the NAIS
and the industrial system it serves, we can protect small farms and affirm the
potential of sustainable agriculture to help transform the ecology of rural and
urban communities for the better.
To get involved with the ongoing work of
NOFA/Mass on NAIS, contact Ben Grosscup, ben.grosscup@nofam0.org, 413 658-5374.
Resources on NAIS
APHIS (USDA) NAIS Homepage
(Find the infamous "Draft Program Standards" that gained the ire of
many farmers.) www.usda.gov/nais
Comments on NAIS "Draft Program Standards" and "Draft Strategic
Plan"
Mary Zanoni, Feb 6, 2006 (A leading voice for a sustainable agriculture message
on NAIS)
NoNAIS.org: Protect Traditional Rights to Farm
(A blog that tracks opposition to NAIS) http://nonais.org/
Texas
Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association
(Leading the fight against NAIS in TX) www.tofga.org
Fowl play: The Poultry Industry's Central Role in the Bird Flu Crisis'. GRAIN,
February 2006.
(Puts recent bird flu events globally in political, economic, and scientific
context) www.grain.org
Fact Sheet: Control Bird Flu by Controlling Intensive Poultry Operations
(A Canadian farmers' rights group's leaflet on factory farm hazards) www.beyondfactoryfarming.org
The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu by Mike Davis.
September 15, 2005.
(A book on the imminent public health danger of bird flu, which has arisen from
factory farms)
This page was last modified on January 21, 2008 at 5:34:07 PM.
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