I want you to read this paragraph from the Time magazine's bullshit article "Tracking Diseased Animals: A System in Need of Repair:"
The cost of NAIS is high. According to a study USDA released last week, full implementation would cost $228 million annually. But not doing so would be even more expensive, it found: the status quo could cost the country $13.2 billion annually if foreign markets shut out U.S. meat for health reasons.
That's surprisingly honest. They tally the costs of a disease outbreak in U.S. livestock in terms of exports lost, not in terms of food safety or health for Americans. That's because it won't do anything to help Americans at all. Animal health problems are much more of a problem in factory farms (petri dishes for disease, as some call them) where thousands of animals crowd together in their own manure. In these environments, diseases can spread through the population and potentially mutate into a form that humans can contract. Not only that, but any bacteria on a factory farm is likely to be resistant to antibiotics because the animals receive antibiotics in their feed to promote growth and to allow them to survive the factory farm conditions. In other words, the problem is not the lack of an animal ID system, it's factory farms. That's a problem NAIS will make worse, not better, as I will explain below.
As for food safety? Food safety problems in meat happen in slaughterhouses, when - as Eric Schlosser might put it - shit gets into the meat. That occurs after the animal is dead and when the national animal ID system is no longer in effect (NAIS ends when an animal dies... while a cow may live its life with an RFID tag in its ear, the tag does not stay with each chunk of that cow's meat after slaughter).
Below, I've included a May 12 press release from the Farm-To-Consumer Legal Defense Fund in which they cite a USDA report from April 29, 2009. According to the USDA, NAIS will cost a factory farm $2.48 per cow, whereas a farm with less than 50 cattle would pay $7.17 per animal. The Legal Defense Fund believes that the USDA underestimates the costs to small farmers, but even if the USDA's numbers were accurate, it still shows how unfair such a system will be to small producers. NAIS will make animal health problems worse, not better, by giving factory farms an additional competitive advantage over small producers.
As a consumer, I am outraged that my health and my ability to buy animal products from ethical farmers will be compromised in the name of our export markets. Clearly, the health of Americans and the ability of Americans to buy the highest quality and most humane and sustainable animal products is less important to our government than the ability of people outside this country to purchase crap quality factory farmed meat. We live with the environmental pollution generated by that meat's production and the potential human diseases and loss of the use of human antibiotics resulting from irresponsible factory farming practices, the foreign consumers get cheap meat, and a few corporations get rich. How's that fair?
To write a letter to the editor of Time, write to Letters at Time dot com.
|
