Animal ID and School Lunches, Part I

There's not much more that truly ticks me off than ignorant bureaucratic requirements that impose burdens on the little guy yet do nothing to accomplish their stated goal.  And the prime example of that right now is a tiny little provision in the House Agriculture Appropriations bill that requires the USDA School Lunch Program to only buy meat that comes from livestock producers registered in USDA's animal ID program.

This, of course, requires a little explanation.  The idea behind USDA's National Animal Identification System is that we  need to have the ability to track every single animal raised for human consumption in the United States.  That, as you might imagine, is a gargantuan undertaking- one website I visited put the number of animals at 2 billion, conservatively.  The point here is to be able to identify and isolate animals that may have been exposed to diseases in the event of an outbreak.  The obvious example is mad cow disease, but potentially just as devastating would be something like hoof and mouth disease.  And to tell the truth, there is some merit to this idea.  A widespread disease outbreak could devastate livestock producers- many, many livestock producers in England were driven out of business, have not returned, and were never adequately compensated for their loss.

This big NAIS push started after the mad cow incidents a few years back.  Interestingly, Congress never actually passed a law to create NAIS- USDA simply went ahead and did it on their own.  And when you get down into the details, you can see USDA went about it in practically the worst way possible.

Last December, The Nation published an article describing the current state of NAIS:

NAIS, ostensibly intended to contain disease outbreaks among livestock, has sparked the most severe political backlash rural America has seen in decades. The controversy stems primarily from the backhanded way the government has imposed a deeply unpopular policy...
A handful of industry stakeholders have cast their shadow over nearly every component of NAIS--past, present and future. A consortium of industry leaders--Cargill Meat Solutions, Monsanto and Schering-Plough, among others--pushed for NAIS for more than a decade and finally won the USDA's approval shortly after George W. Bush took office in 2001.

If you have any interest in the topic at all, I highly recommend the full article here.

Not surprisingly, the NAIS fight has been fierce, uniting the left and right in opposing a flawed and invasive government mandate (it's not hard to find information on the web- you can start at nonais.org).  As a result of this opposition, USDA decided to make participation in NAIS voluntary, but then started encouraging states to make participation mandatory.  The repeated back door efforts they've undertaken to make the program mandatory by default are worthy of a separate blog post.

But most egregious is the way in which the current NAIS completely favors a vertically integrated, CAFO-based meat production system.  Right from the get-go, the system is rigged against the small producer.  Large CAFOs whose animals essentially stay in one place their whole lives can use "lot tagging"- taking a large group of animals, assigning them one animal ID number, and not having to track and/or tag each individual animal.  The small producer, on the other hand, has to buy tags, complete paperwork, etc. for every single animal- unless they decide to put their animals in a tight controlled facility where their is no chance they'll come into contact with animals outside of their "lot".  And we all know what that means- more mega-CAFOs and all of their negative effects.

Furthermore, in a typical Bush administration move, USDA has actually turned over the management of NAIS databases to private companies.  This is a truly horrifying prospect.  From a purely market point of view, can you imagine Cargill (which is running an animal ID database) knowing where every single animal in the United States is located and how old they are?  Cargill would have the ability to predict how many animals were going to be delivered to their plants on any given day- creating the potential for massive market manipulation (of course, Cargill and others deny they would ever use this information for that sort of thing).

Even worse, those pushing NAIS have much grander plans for this data.  From The Nation:

At a recent animal genetics conference in Switzerland, a team of geneticists described how NAIS-like animal identification systems had "huge potential for a genetic improvement programme where lack of individual identification is one of the main hurdles."

Agribusiness is in a global scramble to secure intellectual property rights over the next generation of biotechnology products. China, Brazil, India and many other countries have accelerated animal biotechnology research. In Canada, Aqua Bounty Farms has patented the first transgenic salmon, which grows to adult dimensions in half the time it takes conventional salmon. Regulators are considering whether to approve the salmon for sale.

The National Animal Genome Research Program, which pioneered the first disease-resistant transgenic cow in 2001, describes NAIS as "a key user" of its national network of genomics resources... 

the most maddening aspect of NAIS: it's so vague that it's hard to pin down exactly what it will do or how or even why. The USDA has left NAIS open-ended so stakeholders can maximize the program's potential value by using it as a platform to develop additional processes or systems. NAIS is a set of open-ended standards and protocols that can support a wide range of operations and processes--including genetic tracking--many of which have nothing to do with disease surveillance.

Great- NAIS might give agribusinesses the information they needs to take control of the genetics of all the livestock in the country.  This is the last step in the complete commodification of livestock production, a completely vertically-integrated factory farm model.  Every animal will be genetically identical, and god forbid a small indepedent producer somehow ends up with genes in their animal they didn't pay a "technology fee" on.  I'm sure many of you remember Percy Schmeiser's difficulties with Monsanto in Canada.

Which brings us all the way back around to the requirement in the House bill for USDA to buy meat from operations registered with this junk NAIS crap.  But I've ran on long enough for today- tomorrow I'll talk about the particular reasons this is such a bad idea (beyond the fact NAIS sucks).