The Secret to Compliance the Regulators Don’t Want Us to Know About; Slumbering with Regulators

www.nonais.org

Saturday, May 16, 2009 at 12:51PM

The agriculture regulators who work so hard to prevent us from obtaining raw milk, or try insanely to register every chicken, goat, and horse in the country, like to think they hold the power to make us follow whatever crazy rules they come up with.

To a certain extent they can, but underneath their bravado, the regulators are well aware of an important truism: the public must be in general agreement for their regulations to work. Or, put another way, if those being regulated disapprove, they will find all kinds of ways around onerous regulations.

The National Animal Identification System (NAIS) is a case in point. The fact that the all-powerful U.S. Department of Agriculture, with the help of its lap dog state ag friends pushing as hard as they can, has been able to only gain one-third farmer compliance after five years of intensive effort on NAIS is testimony to the farm community’s resistance.

The reason USDA is suddenly pushing so hard on such things as “listening sessions” isn’t that the agency wants to gain feedback from farmers–it knows full well how much most hate NAIS–but rather the agency hopes to fool farmers into thinking they have a say. The Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund reported in a press release that at the first such listening session in Harrisburg, PA, Friday, 27 of 36 individuals who testified spoke against NAIS. I’m not going out on much of a limb to predict this effort will fail as fully as previous such efforts.

The real message here is that USDA is very worried that NAIS could collapse of its own unnecessary weight, and the active refusal of farmers to participate.

Implicit in comments from Sylvia Gibson and Hugh Betcha on my previous post, individuals are increasingly looking for ways around, between, or outside the regulatory meddling. They want to establish their farms and raise their herds and quietly market their raw milk or cheese or grass-fed beef outside the view of nosy and interfering regulators.

Last week, Lykke wondered if “farmers starting-up a raw milk business have adequate information from the various sources (government, university extension, farm advisors, advocacy groups). I hunt around the web and find so little about the process, best approaches (including how to navigate through the regulations, private lab tests, government testing programs, etc.).”

The obvious answer is that the establishment organizations don’t want farmers to have such information, since raw dairy production may offer them a way to raise themselves by their bootstraps, and Big Ag wouldn’t want that. But even if the USDA and state ag agencies decided they really wanted to economically help their constituencies, I venture it would take a lot of outreach to convince farmers to participate. Given the current regulation-happy approach, farmers are doing everything they can to stay off the radar screen, for fear of being registered, or even noticed.

***

Speaking of regulators, thanks to Amanda Rose for her offer last week to host a book reading/slumber party at her place in California in early October in honor of my upcoming book about raw milk. And to Lykke and Concerned Person for offering support.

We should have some early copies of the book available. I’d like to second Amanda’s encouragement to the regulator types to partake. Despite all my tough talk, I don’t bite. And the book portrays some as real people with real concerns. Besides I can’t wait to see regulators in pajamas.

Thursday

14May

Why Farmers Aren’t Buying Into the “Sky Is Falling” Hype About NAIS, and Other “Traceability”– Initiatives

 www.nonais.org

Thursday, May 14, 2009 at 09:31PM

As long as we’re discussing our fear-based culture, I should mention the National Animal Identification System (NAIS).

A dairy farmer wrote recently to gently remind me I hadn’t written much of late about NAIS, and to urge me to do so because it’s back in the news. I was so preoccupied over the last ten months or so with writing and researching my book about the politics of raw milk (due to be published next fall) that I have neglected to provide updates on NAIS. Over that time period, we’ve had an election and a new administration take office.

So when I went to update myself on what’s happening, I found that, despite all the political shuffling, the government and agriculture trade group rhetoric on NAIS hasn’t changed a bit. The most notable additional development may be a worldwide effort to broaden animal tracking to include “traceability” of all food ingredients back to their producers.

On the NAIS front, the latest wrinkle is a series of U.S. Department of Agriculture “listening sessions” around the country about NAIS. In announcing the sessions, the secretary of agriculture was quoted as suggesting NAIS is inevitable: “USDA needs to hear directly from our stakeholders as we work together to create an animal disease traceability program we can all support,” Tom Vilsack.

Ready to fan the fear flames are organizations like the American Veterinary Medical Association. One of its top officials told a Congressional committee, “The U.S. cannot afford to wait for a crisis to make a mandatory animal identification system a reality.”

Amidst all the rhetoric, the most revealing facts about NAIS may be that the USDA has been attempting to sign up farms and other production facilities for five years now, and over that time span, has succeeded only in attracting about one-third of all facilities. For all the chicken-little rhetoric, farmers seem to appreciate better than the general population that NAIS is just another outgrowth of our culture of fear.

Since the program has been billed as “voluntary,” the one thing that can doom the entire effort is lack of effective farm participation. (There are many opponents who argue that NAIS becomes less and less “voluntary” as times goes on, and states push ever harder to help USDA achieve its signup goals…which makes the relatively small percentage of registrations all the more remarkable.)

In addition,the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund is fighting the USDA in federal court, but it will likely be many months, and possibly years, until its case is resolved.

It’s important to understand that NAIS and similar animal tracking programs in other countries aren’t isolated phenomena. They are part of a larger worldwide effort to trace ALL foods, including fruits and veggies, back to their producers. As part of that effort, technology companies with all kinds of new bar codes and other tracking devices are springing up, with backing from government agencies around the world.

It may be too late to keep all these new bureaucratic efforts from establishing deep roots. But defeating NAIS would send a strong message that small farms in particular don’t need more layers of bureaucracy to encourage them to produce safe foods.