Moving Day?
An APHIS-less USDA? Could it be that the administration will persuade Congress to move the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Services (APHIS) – lock, stock, and barrel, so to speak – over to a new Department of Homeland Security?
The administration has gone on record saying that APHIS, in the name of national security, must leave its time-honored spot at the agriculture department. That’s a spot that trade groups representing the livestock industry have become comfortable with – even if they haven’t always agreed with what folks at APHIS have done.
U.S. Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman, while noting that APHIS has a “big border responsibility” which obviously could affect domestic security, said that she and Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge will be working “to define the parameters of” legislation needed to transfer any functions out of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Secretary Veneman, known as a “team player” in Washington, wasn’t about to hint at any exceptions to President Bush’s proposal to move APHIS, period.
Ridge recognizes that APHIS has some non-Homeland Security duties, which complicate the matter. He has also been hearing from other groups who stand to lose some functions – the Coast Guard, U.S. Customs Service, Immigration and Naturalization Service, etc. So far, however, most interest groups had been loath to come out against the administration’s plan to pull chunks of existing agencies over to a new agency to combat terrorism. No one, after all, wants to appear soft on terror!
Tom Cook, head of the National Renderers Association (NRA), told this correspondent that renderers rely on APHIS for export certification – something that has nothing to do with security in the United States, but something that is vital to business survival. How important might such a non-security issue be at a department charged with guarding our country against terrorist attacks, he wondered.
NRA, as part of a broad coalition of agricultural interests, has submitted nine pages of questions to Ridge. They want to make sure, Cook said, that the administration understands and appreciates their concerns.
Note: In testimony before the House Agriculture Committee, C.W. (Bill) McMillan, who was assistant secretary of agriculture for Marketing and Inspection Services (including APHIS) during the Reagan administration, said that APHIS already “seizes hundreds of pounds of plant and animal materials” every month at our country’s borders. “Its expertise in this area,” he pointed out, “will be of great service to the Department of Homeland Security. Its function as the guardian of zoo animals [another APHIS responsibility] would not.”
Politically Correct Animals
Heat on the poultry and livestock industries is being turned up a notch by the supermarket and fast food industries. The Food Marketing Institute (FMI) and the National Council of Chain Restaurants have come up with guidelines for the humane treatment of farm animals.
These guidelines are voluntary, but point to the growing concern – and/or clout – over animal welfare issues. PETA – People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals – and other activist groups had already pressured McDonalds and some supermarket chains to agree to more closely look at their supplier’s treatment of animals.
Karen Brown, spokesperson for FMI noted, “This is the first time that the retail industry has clearly said the issue of farm animal welfare is important to it. We want to be proactive and not wait for the time people are knocking down our doors about it.”
Note: The egg industry, which had been particularly targeted on forced molting, cage size for layers, beak trimming, and the like, responded with a certification plan for eggs produced under the new animal welfare guidelines. Producers representing nearly two-thirds of this country’s layers say they will participate. United Egg Producers (UEP) is working on a seal to identify cartons of eggs that pass muster.
“Eggs will never be produced in the same way again,” commented Al Pope, UEP president.
ELGs on Hit List
The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) proposed Effluent Limitation Guidelines (ELGs) are on the American Meat Institute’s (AMI’s) hit list. Here are some of the things AMI had to say:
• “Fundamentally flawed and riddled with serious sampling, analytical, and engineering errors;
• “Untenable and unjustified conclusions…conclusions are mystifying;
• “Cost underestimated by a factor of 11…cost estimates are about as accurate as a description of Bill Gates’ wealth as ‘above average.’”
Obviously, the meat industry is hoping EPA will deep-six this one!
Briefly
• “Chimps have 98.7 percent of DNA in common with humans,” animal rights lawyer Steven Wise told a Washington audience. “Both my son Christopher (age 4½) and your average adult chimpanzee obviously meet any minimum rational standard for entitlement to basic legal rights.” (Most mammals, it might be noted, have DNA that is at least 90 percent comparable with humans.)
• No more leather basketballs for championship games, says the National Collegiate Athletic Association. This decision seemed to have something to do with talks with PETA. The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association is urging the livestock industry to complain.
• “They have taken the sacred cow, put it in a barn under horrific conditions, and turned it into a milk machine,” according to Washington resident Sally Fallon, author of the Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats.
Her solution? “Cow-share, the wave of the future.” Cow-share, to explain, is owning a share in a cow that a farmer keeps on the farm, where he tends it and milks it, turning the milk over to the “shareholders.” It’s a way of getting around the legal ban most states have against selling raw milk.
• Over that flap about U.S. poultry meeting Russian safety standards, Senior Trade Advisor and Counselor to the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture David Hegwood commented that he was “personally affronted” when a country unfairly criticizes U.S. food safety when it has a “dysfunctional system” of its own.
• A U.S. district court judge in South Dakota ruled that the Beef Checkoff is unconstitutional and ordered it halted. Folks at the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association were calling the ruling a “temporary setback,” saying that the ruling would likely be “stayed” so that the checkoff could continue while the decision was going through the appeals process.
• And this from Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who dissented (along with three other justices) from the court’s ruling that public high schools can extend random drug testing from athletic endeavors to all other extracurricular activities, such as chess, band, Future Farmers of America, etc. She noted that the Tecumseh, OK, school policy which made its way to the Supreme Court had been put into effect where officials there admitted they had no “major” drug problem, and where in her opinion extracurricular activities weren’t high-risk, “notwithstanding nightmarish images of out-of-control flatware, livestock run amok, and colliding tubas.”
• Way-finding? That’s how the State Department defined its objective for a recent survey conducted at headquarters here in Washington. Notices posted throughout the building read, “The department is researching methods to improve the manner in which employees and visitors find their way through the corridors.” A contractor, hired with taxpayer dollars, was interviewing people on how well they were finding their way!
August 2002 Render