by Aaron Turpen, MiliLib

A flurry of news surrounded the announcement by United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Secretary Tom Vilsack that the controversial National Animal Identification System (NAIS) would be scrapped. The measure met stiff resistance from homesteaders, small farmers, organic growers, and raw milk and whole foods advocates. The problem is, the news is wrong. The NAIS isn’t being scrapped, it’s just being shelved “pending more review.”

There is a mixture of good and bad news in the USDA’s decision. The decision was likely not made to benefit the small producer or the homesteader. Rather, it was probably made in order to take them out of the debate so that the tracking system could go through.

The original NAIS plan would have required onerous costs on small agricultural producers – whether they were selling product or not – and distinctly favored the large agricultural conglomerates, who could easily afford the new rules. Rules which applied differently to them.

In the NAIS, each animal on a farm would require a tracking number and 48-hour reporting of its whereabouts and condition. This applied to everything from backyard poultry to cattle herds in the hundreds of thousands. The big difference was that large (industrial) livestock herds could be tracked as a single unit, whereas small homestead or farm herds had to be tracked as individual animals.

Besides the economic reasoning, however, whole foods advocates like Judith McGeary of the Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance say that the system itself is a waste of taxpayer’s money. Tracking the animals does nothing but allow for finding the source after the fact, but nothing to prevent anything up front. The whole excuse for the NAIS was to be able to prevent diseases like mad cow from spreading.

“USDA’s claim that we need 48-hour traceback of all animal movements is not supported by scientific studies or logic. The agency should focus on high risk situations, namely the factory farms. The agency should also look at the specific diseases of concern and how they are spread. A one-size-fits-all approach will not work.”⁵

Now, any animal that does not cross state lines upon its sale is not required to be tracked. This eliminates most small farms, local sellers, and homesteaders out of the equation, which would, in turn, give them no reason to combat the USDA’s plans for a future NAIS.

However, it will still effect many of us in the whole foods and organic lifestyle movements. Anyone who has homesteaded realizes that you cannot produce everything you need all on your own. You need neighbors with whom you can barter and do business. A small farmer on the eastern edge of Wyoming, for instance, may need chicks to replenish his hen house after an unfortunate fox attack. He is as likely to go into Nebraska, next door, as anywhere else. Except now he`s crossed state lines, so those chicks must be registered with NAIS.

That is only one example and assumes that the USDA will not expand the reach of its program once it’s in place. Further, it’s obvious that the USDA’s plan to track animals will do nothing to prevent disease and only allow them to point the finger to lay blame when an outbreak occurs.

The real problem here are the huge, commercial meat producers who handle their cattle as if they were merely cogs in the wheel at a factory. This industrial agriculture means huge stockyards with thousands of pens holding hundreds upon hundreds of animals packed in shoulder-to-shoulder, wallowing in their own filth. This is a disease bomb just waiting to explode onto the market.

The USDA’s plan for NAIS is not to scuttle the project, but only to change it and re-introduce the same idea in a couple of years. This does nothing to prevent disease and everything to cater to the huge agricultural conglomerates and industrial meat producers.

All while making life more difficult, even impossible, for the small farmer and homesteader.

Resources:
1 – USDA Plans to Drop Program to Trace Livestock, William Neuman, New York Times, Feb. 5, 2010

2 – USDA Announces New Framework for Animal Disease Traceability, USDA, Feb. 5, 2010

3 – Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance Weighs in on NAIAS, Hartke Is Online, June8, 2009

4 – Q&A: New Animal Disease Traceability Framework, USDA APHIS, February 2010

5 – Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance Weighs in on NAIAS, Hartke Is Online, June 8, 2009

by Aaron Turpen

(NaturalNews) In the United States, one of our favorite slogans comes from our national anthem: “The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.” Most Americans don’t seem to realize that this statement is no longer relevant to our nation and its people. We have become the land of the diseased and the home of the wholly owned subsidiary.

Through control of the government, gained by usurping the People, large corporations have used the power of the regulatory to control who can and who cannot compete and profit in their markets. Big Agriculture and their industrialized minions have completely taken over the United States Department of Agriculture, the Congress, and the Food and Drug Administration and awarded themselves billions in subsidies for their efforts.

Every year, these corporate giants of agriculture reap rewards in the form of government (taxpayer) largesse, which they use to artificially lower food prices and edge out the little man who might compete. When a new trend, such as organic foods, emerges as a consumer preference in the marketplace, they move quickly to gain control of what is and isn’t allowed to be labeled, working the rules to their favor, and to profit even more.

Pharmaceuticals play a similar game, controlling the FDA – the very agency meant to regulate them – and thus pushing any alternatives out of the market. Despite whatever a Doctor or health expert might say about a product, if it’s not approved by the FDA (and thus Big Pharma), it’s not allowed to say anything relating to its benefits beyond the overly-general.

Through these tactics, both the Big Ag and Big Pharma cartels have managed to not only gain near-total control of the food and drug markets in the United States, but they’ve managed to generally give their competition (the alternatives) a bad name in the process by wreaking total ruination on the terms that used to mean “good” and “healthy.”

No longer is “organic” anything more than a marketing buzz word with little or no meaning. “Alternative medicine” now virtually means “quackery” to most people.

Big Pharma Owns Medicine
In his documentary film Big Bucks, Big Pharma: Marketing Disease and Pushing Drugs, Ronit Ridberg¹ manages to outline how the pharmaceutical companies have accomplished their iron fisted control of the American health care industry.

In this film, you see how total control of the industry, whose goal is supposedly to put patient care and your health needs above all else, is primarily controlled, instead, by pharmaceutical profits. What’s more, the pharmaceutical companies promote propaganda that’s so effective that Goebbels himself would be impressed – from virtually unheard-of diseases made mainstream (ala “Restless Leg Syndrome”) to diseases whose definitions are so vague that they could include nearly anyone (the “disorders”).

By controlling patent law and what can and can’t be labeled as a “medicine,” the pharmaceutical giants own the market. Then you look at who “regulates” them and you see the rest of the picture. The FDA is made up of two basic arms: scientific and managerial. The management arm ultimately makes the decisions and thus national policies on the drugs allowed to be sold on the market. Time and time again, management routinely ignores the science and sides with the pharmaceutical company.

The Vioxx scandal was a glaring example of this in action. Even after Merck, the makers of Vioxx, pulled it from shelves as being dangerously deadly, the FDA stood behind the drug anyway, even claiming before Congress that it was “safe.”^{2, 3}

Big Agra Rules Your Dinner Plate
The giant agricultural conglomerates and their regulatory arms (the USDA and the FDA) are no better off. Currently, in the U.S., genetically modified seed crops make up 91% of our soybean crops and 68% of corn.⁴ That’s just two crops. They’re working on sugar beets, wheat, and others now as well.

That is just one facet of the game. Working the other end of the stick, the big agricultural conglomerates have managed to reap up to $9 billion per year in corn subsidies.⁵ Then comes the corn as fuel subsidies, or corn ethanol payoffs from our tax dollars. This amounts to another $1.3 billion (in 2007) on top of the other subsidies the agricultural giants already receive.⁶

These subsidies don’t go to the happy family farm with a couple of milk cows out to pasture, a few crops on a hundred acres, and mom and pop working together with their teenaged son to grow healthy food. The tens and even hundred of billions in total farm bill subsidies the government throws around every year largely go to the single-crop, big agricultural conglomerates rather than to Farmer Dan and his family.

Those farmers who use traditional methods (aka “organic” or “sustainable” methods) versus the new, industrialized way of using synthetic fertilizers cannot sell their produce as “organic” or with “organic” on the label without submitting to heavy regulatory requirements and filings with the FDA.⁷ Yep, it’s illegal to use a word to describe your product without government approval.

These are just a few of the means by which Big Agra controls your food. You are fed corn syrup from genetically modified corn, sugar from over-processed cane and beets (which could also be GMO), and worse. Your milk, meat, and even your table salt are all controlled and manipulated to profit them and potentially kill you. One needs only to read a few days’ worth of headlines here at Natural News to see these concepts in action.

The Final Control
New legislation makes it basically illegal to sell naturally-sourced supplements as anything more than their scientific name and to force small, artisan and local farms and food producers out of business by adding odious requirements to their overhead and costs. These bills are brought before either of the houses of Congress every year – usually more than once per session.

Often, regulatory changes at the FDA and USDA will just slightly alter one thing or another, always to the detriment of small business and natural production.

It’s time Americans stopped being the victims and once again become the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. Fight back against these infringements on your health. They’re working on taking over your well-being at the most fundamental of levels with food and medicine and on controlling what those things are and what you can have access to.

We need to take control back now, before it’s too late.

Footnotes:
1 – Big Bucks, Big Pharma low-res version (full length, about 45 minutes) available online: http://www.mediaed.org/cgi-bin/comm…

2 – Despite Warmings, Drug Giant Took Long Path to Vioxx Recall, New York Times, November 14, 2004: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/14/b…

3 – Reputation of the FDA in shambles after Vioxx scandal, NaturalNews, November 6, 2004: http://www.naturalnews.com/002157_t…

4 – Racing Toward a Roundup-Ready Food Future, The Huffington Post, July 17, 2009: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nancy…

5 – Corn Subsidies by Year, the Environmental Working Group: http://farm.ewg.org/farm/progdetail…

6 – Are Corn Ethanol Farm Subsidies Too Complex to Understand?, gas2.0, October 24, 2008: http://gas2.org/2008/10/24/are-corn…

7 – USDA-FDA Organic Foods Label: http://usda-fda.com/Articles/Organi…