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Small farmers, big ranchers, home farmers, animal and pet
owners, and food freedom advocates have come together to
legally fight implementation of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s
National Animal Identification System (NAIS). The results
are encouraging.
Farm
and ranch organizations, R-CALF
USA being one of the leaders, along with the Farm-to-Consumer
Foundation, NoNais.org run by farmer Walter Jeffries in Vermont,
Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance, and even a few rural newspapers,
along with some concerned attorneys, have done yeoman’s
service in the fight to oppose the onerous and intrusive NAIS – the
program initiated to track and monitor all animals and their
movements.
R-CALF USA along with several states’ cattlemen’s
associations has now accused the USDA of, among other things:
improperly acquiring premises registrations by “registering
premises without farmer or rancher consent,” by tapping
into different states’ agriculture databases and county
fair records, and using improper tactics directed at 4-H participants;
proceeding without regard to cost, liability and confidentiality
concerns for livestock producers; misrepresenting the Privacy
Act protections; and of protecting and assisting meatpackers
in transferring NAIS information to carcasses, thereby exposing
individual producers to liability for problems that occur or
are created after the animal leaves the farm.
With this in mind, R-CALF and a host of other concerned associations
have formally requested leaders of the Senate Committee on
Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, and the House Committee
on Oversight and Government Reform, to halt advancement of
NAIS and to conduct oversight hearings on the USDA’s
activities.
Also, on June 4, 2008, the U.S. District Court, District of
Columbia, ordered the USDA to suspend its plan to establish
by June 9, 2008 a system of records entitled “National
Animal Identification System.” The suspension
was immediate and indefinite and was the result of a legal
case, Mary-Louise Zanoni v. United States Department of
Agriculture. Mary-Louise Zanoni is an upstate New York
attorney and leading farm activist in the fight to protect
the traditional rights of farmers. The suit was filed in an
attempt to seek access to the NAIS database to determine its
accuracy.
The USDA’s proposed NAIS program, incidentally never
voted into law by Congress, was supposed to be a three-step “voluntary” program,
but in many states it is anything but. Wisconsin
farmer Jeff Pausma, who runs a relatively small dairy operation
of about 60 cows, received a letter stating that if he did
not comply with the Wisconsin NAIS law, he would lose his milk
producer license. For Pausma, the expense of having to participate
in the program with its mandatory electronic tagging system
is quite a bit of a financial burden as well. As a small farmer,
every one of his cows must be identified, tagged, and tracked,
each with separate numbers. Meanwhile, factory-style mega-farms
need only one federal ID number for the whole farm, an injustice
clearly in favor of big agribusiness.
Another small farm activist group, Farm-to-Consumer
Legal Defense Fund, filed suit on July 14, 2008, also in
the U.S. District Court, District of Columbia, to stop the
USDA and the Michigan Department of Agriculture (MDA) from
implementing NAIS as well. The MDA had already implemented
the first two steps, namely property registration and animal
identification, and the suit asks the court for an injunction
to stop NAIS at either the state or federal levels. Fund President
Taaron Meikle, who calls the program one that “only a
bureaucrat could love,” also says that existing programs
for diseases and state laws on branding along with existing
record keeping already provide the mechanisms needed for tracking.
This new suit charges the USDA with never having published
NAIS rules, a violation of the Federal Administrative Procedures
Act; never having performed an Environmental Impact Statement
or Assessment as required by law; and also violation of religious
freedoms guaranteed by the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
The good news is that the case will be heard by the same judge
who ruled in favor of suspending NAIS on June 4.
Several states have passed legislation to protect citizens
from the massive government-sanctioned program. Nebraska passed
a law providing for a procedure for withdrawal from the premise
registrations. Kentucky’s law prevents the release of
confidential information for the purposes of NAIS. Arizona
prohibits mandated or forced participation, and Missouri passed
a similar law, with the addition of allowing its citizens to
withdraw from the program at any time. But these are just band-aid-sized
appeasements.
John Wallace, a candidate for Congress in New York’s
20th Congressional District, says the
current NAIS program is not about preventing mad cow or other
diseases since most contamination happens in the processing
plants after the animals have been sold. It is, he says, “about
helping big corporate agribusiness and RFID chip manufacturers
make bigger profits at the expense of the small family farmers
and ranchers. Protecting America’s food supply and preserving
the country’s livestock’s resistance to diseases
can best be protected by the continued decentralization of
our nation’s food production and processing.”
Wallace’s conclusion is constitutionally spot-on:
The current U.S. Department of Agriculture NAIS program
means bigger government, more government intrusion, more regulations,
more paperwork, more fees, more taxes and more federal spending.
It will only result in less privacy, less freedom, less liberty,
and less property and 4th Amendment rights for American citizens.
It’s exactly the kind of unconstitutional federal program
every American citizen and their elected federal representatives
should oppose.
For a time it appeared that the NAIS program was going to
be a steamroller crushing the rights of citizens. But courageous
individuals standing up to the bureaucrats are demonstrating
that activism in the name of liberty and freedom can indeed
be effective in putting a stop to the march of big government.
http://www.jbs.org/index.php/jbs-news-feed/7-jbs-news-feed/2188-farmers-and-ranchers-fight-nais-and-win |