One bill has already made it through the House as SB 2749. It includes the National Animal Identification System (NAIS), in which each animal you own (except dogs & cats) must be chipped (with Cargill chips, at your expense), and your premises registered with the government, in addition to requiring paperwork to be filed with the government every time your animal leaves or returns to your premises. Non-compliance results in hefty fines. Veterinarians will be fined for not reporting any un-chipped animals to the government.
Large factory farms (CAFOs-Containment Animal Feeding Operations) are exempted from chipping each animal, but only are required to chip one animal in their massive herds, which defeats the stated purpose of the regulations.
the US - the CAFOs - but instead buries local family farms in inappropriate regulations and paperwork under the guise of “food safety”.
This bill would effectively drive many, many, very good and very needed, family farms out of business with enormous demands on manpower and resources that amount to nothing but extremely expensive busywork. The original wording of much of the bill actually came directly from Monsanto and Cargill sponsored organizations, taken from ‘voluntary regulations' already enacted by a number of states without having to pass through legislation.
The NAIS is only one of the major problems with these bills.
The bills create incentives for retailers to import food from other countries while not actually being able to hold foreign food facilities to the same standards as US facilities, allowing less-safe food to be brought the US, while undercutting American farmers. However, corporate farms - multinationals - would benefit from this provision, as they own large operations in other countries, paying far below US farm wages (which are already low) and using cheaper and
far less safe growing methods.And that's not the only problem.
In these bills, a practical distinction between CAFOs (factory farms) and small farms raising pastured animals is not made. Protection from contamination of crops such as spinach, by fertilizer and runoff from CAFOs, is not included (read abo
ut that here).
The importance of crop and animal biodiversity - the check against devastation by disease developed by nature over billions of years, versus the mono cropping practiced and encouraged over the last 50 years by corporate farm interests - is not addressed. Access to information and research on the safety of GMO crops is not protected, and tight regulation of corporate owned GMO based sterilizing seeds - Terminator seeds (GURTS), which can sterilize fields of contaminated food crops, making seed unusable - is not addressed, nor is the current ownership of most of the world's seed supplies by one bio-tech/chemical corporation.
Much heavier use of herbicides on fields of genetically modified herbicide resistant crops (such as Roundup-Ready) have led to damage to pollinators including Monarch butterflies and bees, and increased toxic runoff to water supplies and contamination of soils. This damaging practice is also not addressed.
If you do like buying from local family farms, and like having them there for you, please help by contacting your state senator NOW.
Senate Bill 510 will be pushed through quickly, as was HB2749, and the damage it will leave family farms open to is serious and largely irreparable.
Similar flawed bills (update - "Processed Food Safety Act" introduced by Sen. Dianne Feinstein D. CA 12 '09) will soon be quietly finding their way through Congress.
Ask your local independant family farmer. And local farmers in Illinois. Texas. New Jersey. Wisconsin. California. Minnesota. Arkansas. Tennessee. ...This bill is a gift to Monsanto, Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland, Smithfield Farms, and Tyson. Unfortunately, those companies, while employing American workers (at very low wages) at their factory farms and pesticide, herbicide, and GMO factories, also employ undocumented workers here, and use workers at substandard wages in non US locations. These companies most often take their profits out of the community, and often out of the country, while enjoying US government tax breaks and large subsidies paid for by US taxpayers.
Local small family farms who are an integral, and once again rapidly growing, part of building very strong local economies in spite of all the roadblocks being thrown in their way, provide safe healthy food and jobs to local communitie
s - and have actually been targeted to be crippled by a blizzard of paperwork and enormous unnecessary expenses.
These bills as currently written will do just that.
The benefit will be to the short-term bottom line of these few influential multinational corporations. No benefit will come to local communities when all is balanced out, and very little if any actual 'food safety' will have been achieved.
These bills were designed to be read quickly and to be passed by non-farmers; designed to sound good, while dealing a death-blow to the growing competition safe, healthy, local food is beginning to be to giant corporate factory farms' bottom line, and impairing actual food safety. Those corporate profits don't come back to the American taxpayer in any meaningful way. However, the environmental damage, health problems caused by factory food practices - in addition to unsafe working conditions and poverty-level wages that are products of factory type farms - cost the American taxpayer, especially the working class taxpayer, a lot.
As usual.
Please contact your state's Senators about Senate Bill 510. Please ask that it effectively address the food safety issues posed by CAFOs, mono cropping/biodiversity, and targeting of family farms by competing corporations.
Link - Contact info for Sen. Patty Murray D-WA.
Link - Contact info for Sen. Maria Cantwell D-WA.
Link - Contact info for other states, districts and territories.
(A phone call's better than an email, and a letter is even better. Why not try all 3?)
The Chair of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee through which the bill passed Wed. is Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) (202)-224-0767, fax (202)-224-5128.
HELP Committee ranking member is Senator Mike Enzi (R-WY), (202)-224-6770
Write or Call Your State Congressman about House Bill 2749 (which includes the NAIS).
WA State Districts here; SJI Rep. is Rick Larsen.
This bill has already passed the House, but your Congressman needs to know a bit more about it.
Read more on Food Safety enhancement Act here, and go to links at right here and on the main Land & Sea page for more info on the bills HR2749 and S510 and NAISWho says you can't grow peppers in the Pacific Northwest? Photos of local produce and farmers at market, above, courtesy of San Juan islander Becky Bolt.
This bill would effectively drive many, many, very good and very needed, family farms out of business with enormous demands on manpower and resources that amount to nothing but extremely expensive busywork. The original wording of much of the bill actually came directly from Monsanto and Cargill sponsored organizations, taken from ‘voluntary regulations' already enacted by a number of states without having to pass through legislation.
The NAIS is only one of the major problems with these bills.
The bills create incentives for retailers to import food from other countries while not actually being able to hold foreign food facilities to the same standards as US facilities, allowing less-safe food to be brought the US, while undercutting American farmers. However, corporate farms - multinationals - would benefit from this provision, as they own large operations in other countries, paying far below US farm wages (which are already low) and using cheaper and
far less safe growing methods.And that's not the only problem.
In these bills, a practical distinction between CAFOs (factory farms) and small farms raising pastured animals is not made. Protection from contamination of crops such as spinach, by fertilizer and runoff from CAFOs, is not included (read abo
ut that here).The importance of crop and animal biodiversity - the check against devastation by disease developed by nature over billions of years, versus the mono cropping practiced and encouraged over the last 50 years by corporate farm interests - is not addressed. Access to information and research on the safety of GMO crops is not protected, and tight regulation of corporate owned GMO based sterilizing seeds - Terminator seeds (GURTS), which can sterilize fields of contaminated food crops, making seed unusable - is not addressed, nor is the current ownership of most of the world's seed supplies by one bio-tech/chemical corporation.
Much heavier use of herbicides on fields of genetically modified herbicide resistant crops (such as Roundup-Ready) have led to damage to pollinators including Monarch butterflies and bees, and increased toxic runoff to water supplies and contamination of soils. This damaging practice is also not addressed.
If you do like buying from local family farms, and like having them there for you, please help by contacting your state senator NOW.
Senate Bill 510 will be pushed through quickly, as was HB2749, and the damage it will leave family farms open to is serious and largely irreparable.
Similar flawed bills (update - "Processed Food Safety Act" introduced by Sen. Dianne Feinstein D. CA 12 '09) will soon be quietly finding their way through Congress.
Ask your local independant family farmer. And local farmers in Illinois. Texas. New Jersey. Wisconsin. California. Minnesota. Arkansas. Tennessee. ...This bill is a gift to Monsanto, Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland, Smithfield Farms, and Tyson. Unfortunately, those companies, while employing American workers (at very low wages) at their factory farms and pesticide, herbicide, and GMO factories, also employ undocumented workers here, and use workers at substandard wages in non US locations. These companies most often take their profits out of the community, and often out of the country, while enjoying US government tax breaks and large subsidies paid for by US taxpayers.
Local small family farms who are an integral, and once again rapidly growing, part of building very strong local economies in spite of all the roadblocks being thrown in their way, provide safe healthy food and jobs to local communitie
s - and have actually been targeted to be crippled by a blizzard of paperwork and enormous unnecessary expenses.These bills as currently written will do just that.
The benefit will be to the short-term bottom line of these few influential multinational corporations. No benefit will come to local communities when all is balanced out, and very little if any actual 'food safety' will have been achieved.
These bills were designed to be read quickly and to be passed by non-farmers; designed to sound good, while dealing a death-blow to the growing competition safe, healthy, local food is beginning to be to giant corporate factory farms' bottom line, and impairing actual food safety. Those corporate profits don't come back to the American taxpayer in any meaningful way. However, the environmental damage, health problems caused by factory food practices - in addition to unsafe working conditions and poverty-level wages that are products of factory type farms - cost the American taxpayer, especially the working class taxpayer, a lot.
As usual.
Please contact your state's Senators about Senate Bill 510. Please ask that it effectively address the food safety issues posed by CAFOs, mono cropping/biodiversity, and targeting of family farms by competing corporations.
Link - Contact info for Sen. Patty Murray D-WA.
Link - Contact info for Sen. Maria Cantwell D-WA.
Link - Contact info for other states, districts and territories.
(A phone call's better than an email, and a letter is even better. Why not try all 3?)
The Chair of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee through which the bill passed Wed. is Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) (202)-224-0767, fax (202)-224-5128.
HELP Committee ranking member is Senator Mike Enzi (R-WY), (202)-224-6770
Write or Call Your State Congressman about House Bill 2749 (which includes the NAIS).
WA State Districts here; SJI Rep. is Rick Larsen.
This bill has already passed the House, but your Congressman needs to know a bit more about it.
Read more on Food Safety enhancement Act here, and go to links at right here and on the main Land & Sea page for more info on the bills HR2749 and S510 and NAISWho says you can't grow peppers in the Pacific Northwest? Photos of local produce and farmers at market, above, courtesy of San Juan islander Becky Bolt.
