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USDA Backs Off Mandatory National Animal Identification Reg

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PORKER

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Tuesday, January 27, 2009
USDA out of NAIS business

In this time of deflationary pressure on all agricultural products, farmers and ranchers got a token boost at the end of December when the USDA`s Animal and Plant Health Inspection-Veterinary Service officially cancelled its Mandatory Premise Registration Directive. The action is seen as confirming the USDA outstripped its authority when in September, under the cover of all the hoopla about the election it changed the status of the National Animal Identification System (NAIS) from voluntary to mandatory. Since the program`s inception, registration had been voluntary.

The action came in response to a formal letter to the USDA from R-CALF, the national cattle producer`s organization formed to address marketing and trade issues in the cattle industry. The letter demanded the agency retract its memorandum mandating registration for all producers engaged in interstate commerce and participating in any one of the dozen or more federally regulated disease programs. According to the letter the memo constituted an unlawful, final regulatory action initiated and implemented without public notice or opportunity to comment as is required under the Administrative Procedure Act.

R-CALF viewed the USDA as caught in an unlawful act of trying to convert what had been promised to be a voluntary animal identification system into a mandatory NAIS. When confronted, the agency backed down, at least for now.

According to the chairman of R-CALF`s animal identification committee quoted on the nonais website, the action by USDA confirms what they have been saying all along, that the USDA does not have the authority to implement NAIS and it is using underhanded and unlawful methods to coerce independent cattle producers into giving up their rights to their property.

What NAIS appears to be

Formulated under the Patriot Act and therefore without legislative review or public commentary, NAIS is a government program that threatens to put thousands of small farmers and ranchers out of business. It is an expensive and unnecessary federal program requiring owners of livestock to tag their animals with electronic tracking devices and report to a data base within 24 hours any births, deaths, ownership transfers, and changes in location.

Often labeled no child left behind, the program has grown to include all livestock species including cattle, bison, deer, elk, llamas, alpacas, horses, donkeys, mules, goats, sheep, swine, all poultry species, and fish. It is the animal equivalent of the RFID embedded national ID card. NAIS would invade the privacy of small farmers and overwhelm them with fees and paperwork, driving them out of business.

Under NAIS larger livestock operations are able to tag whole groups of animals with one ID device. Smaller ranchers and farmers, however, will be forced to tag each individual animal at a cost ranging from $3 to $20 per head. And NAIS applies to anyone who owns any single animal, granny with her chicken, or the family who keeps a cow. There are no exceptions.

Up until September, membership in NAIS was to be voluntary although the term was used loosely. More than $150 million in taxpayer money has been used to promote NAIS, money that could have been spent on more inspectors to oversee meat processing plants. NAIS money has been used to influence non-government organizations into a public/private partnership to promote the organization.

The Future Farmers of American and the 4H Club received large sums in support of its member children coercing their parents to sign up. Registration has been mandatory for anyone wishing to display an animal at state fairs, and veterinarians were encouraged to register animals without the consent of the owner. Strict enforcement involves fines, inspections of properties and the potential for confiscation or redistribution of livestock done by the USDA or state governments without trial or legal hearing and with no compensation to the owner of the animals. Failure to register the home or farm with a Premise ID called for a fine of $1,000 per day.

What NAIS may really be all about

Sold to the public initially as a necessity to protect the health of U.S. livestock and poultry and the economic well-being of those industries, the propaganda has increased to include protection of the public health through the ability to track to the farm of origin every animal admitted into the food chain. However, the U.S. is a net imported of beef, and the USDA is allowing importation of beef from countries where no animal tracking is available. The biggest export customers of U.S. beef are Canada and Mexico, and they do not require NAIS.

Clearly NAIS has nothing to do with arresting disease or protecting the food supply. The initiative was never intended for this purpose. State animal registries already document the origins of animals before entering the food supply. And contamination of food generally happens after the food leaves the farm. Many examples of factory contaminated food fill the news. If a problem is discovered after the food has left the factory, at the consumer level, recall procedures are in place.

Meat sold in stores and restaurants is supposedly USDA inspected during slaughter and processing. The large number of recalls reveals that meat from big commercial producers may not have been properly inspected. NAIS does nothing to halt the spread of mad cow disease, a disease believed to be caused by the practice of grinding up old cows and adding them to cow feed. This practice is banned, and it is the job of the USDA to enforce that ban. Only a more efficient USDA inspection program can improve food safety.

NAIS is not about protecting health or helping industry. It is about increasing the control of the federal government over the food supply and thereby increasing control over the American people. And some believe it is about much more.

Columnist Derry Brownfield traces the inception of NAIS back to the World Wilderness Congress held in Denver in 1987. After 1500 people from sixty countries gathered to talk about ozone deterioration, the importance of rain forests, and protecting endangered species, a few of the worlds heavy hitters in the banking industry met to chat about creation of a World Conservation Bank with collateral being derived from receipt of the world`s wilderness properties. The bank would emulate the Federal Reserve in its power to create currency and loans. It would finance itself by swapping debt for assets. A country with huge ballooning national debt like the U.S. would receive money to pay off the debt by swapping it for wilderness lands.

According to Brownfield, the goal of the World Bank has been the insistence on collateralization of loans with land (they give you the money, you give them the Amazon). Like the Federal Reserve, the World Bank can create a limitless supply of money they will then barter with debtor nations such as the U.S. in a scheme to monetize land. In this position the World Bank will function as the bank for the coming one-world government and will issue a one-world fiat currency.

The only assets the U.S. has to offer as collateral are federal lands and national parks, including the Heritage sites. In addition to this is the Rim of the Valley National Park that would include over 500,000 acres of national forest land and 170,000 parcels of private property that include many farms and ranches, according to Brownfield. There is also a bill before Congress calling for the increase in acreage of designated wildernesses by 50% in the lower 48 states. Other countries have much greater acreage. All together this land comprises over one third of the earth`s land mass. Brownfield sees the NAIS is a way to get even more.

He points out that throughout the literature of NAIS, land is referred to as premises, not property. While the Constitution of the United States grants property rights exclusively to the owner attached to it under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, a premise has no such protection.

The word premise is a synonym for the word tenement which is defined in law as property such as land held by one person leasing it to another in conveyance. Conveyance is defined as the transfer of ownership of real property from one person to another. Brownfield is convinced that once property is registered with NAIS the deed becomes encumbered by the term premise.

As the recent unfolding of what has been dubbed the financial crisis has revealed, the central bankers of the world are in the process of accumulating the wealth of the world. The term wealth has traditionally placed priority value on land and livestock. When people have been stripped of the ownership of their assets and thus their wealth, there is little to prevent them from falling into enslavement.

Sources:

R-CALF-USDA Cancels Mandatory Premise Registration Directive? NoNAIS.org.

Ron Paul, Stop the NAIS, LewRockwell.com.

Derry Brownfield, The SCAM behind NAIS: Our Land, Collateral for the National Debt, OpEdNews.com.
 
NAIS is not about protecting health or helping industry. It is about increasing the control of the federal government over the food supply and thereby increasing control over the American people. And some believe it is about much more.
Like taxing food and non-food animals!!!!!!!!!!

BINGO!
 
When you control the ability of an asset to earn a return (like land for raising cattle or other things) you control the asset itself. This is the underlying concept in the poultry industry that has allowed economic hold up in that industry by integrators who control the quality of the inputs. They were able to capture all of the economic rents for themselves. They justified this by saying they were giving these economic rents to consumers and courts that have used consumer welfare to judge whether the free market was working or not fell for it hook line and sinker. Meanwhile, the competitive advantage of gathering those economic rents accrued to the integrators who used it to beat out competitors and concentrate the industry.

I am sure NAIS was used to do the same as I read the poultry working group was going to require small farmers to provide individual tags to their livestock and let the big boys just have one premise id for all of their livestock. Can you imagine the govt. burdening all of the small producers with these costs just to have another competitive advantage in the food industry?

It is incredible what the fascist element in our government has been able to have the gall to suggest.

We need NAIS to track the kind of people who are puppets for big industry in the USDA. They should be tracked down and deported to the remaining totalitarian governments in the world and then we should think about military action against them.
 
Yes they stopped trying to write NAIS into the regs because its about to be passed into law by congress. I will post a email that I recieved about it either yesterday or today later tonight after I get back from a meeting.
 
NAIS, ALMA and other such related programs are the brain child and agenda of the OIE, which is the World Organization for Animal Health (Organization International Epizoology), headed by the vet Bernard Vallat.

172 countries belong to this organization. They were set up originally (so it appears) after BSE caused so much trouble. They are funded by donations from member countries and the World Bank. See the editorals and press releases for more details.

This article demonstrates what they want the future of agriculture to be: animal pharmaceuticals (just like my late friend's book "Animal Pharm" by Mark Purdey - there is a long term agenda and strategy for the TRANSFORMATION of the livestock industry.

http://www.oie.int/eng/Edito/en_edito_apr08.htm

15-Jul-2008

Animal identification and product traceability from the farm to the fork must be progressively implemented worldwide

Marking animals to know who their owners are is a very ancient practice. Traditional livestock marking systems have existed since time immemorial. They were not generally motivated by health reasons. However, with the progressive intensification of animal production, new tools have been developed to enable animal marking methods to meet a multitude of new needs. Today, animal identification and traceability are important management tools in animal health and food safety. In many countries traceability of live domestic animals and of products of animal origin is a legal requirement.

The pillars of a traceability system are founded upon the identification of individual animals or homogenous groups of animals, the ability to track their movements, proper identification of premises, and recording of this information in appropriate registers.

In its capacity as a leading international standard-setting organisation for animal identification and traceability, the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) helps its Member Countries and Territories to implement animal identification and traceability systems in order to improve the effectiveness of their policies and activities relating to disease prevention and control, animal production food safety, and certification of exports. The OIE first addressed the issue of traceability in 1998 at the international seminar "Permanent animal identification systems and traceability from farm to fork",in Buenos Aires , Argentina .In 2001 the OIE devoted an entire issue of the Scientific and Technical Review to traceability. In 2005 an ad hoc Group of experts was established and, in March 2006, the OIE Terrestrial Animal Health Standards Commission established a first series of guidelines on identification and traceability on behalf of OIE Members, which democratically adopted them in May 2007 as official OIE standards.

Why have national or regional animal traceability systems?

First of all they help producers and the institutions that support them to manage their animals more effectively, to implement herd/flock health programmes or to apply breeding or genetic improvement programmes. Whether in response to disease outbreaks or in the context of disease prevention, traceability can help countries to put in place a wide range of measures, including surveillance, early detection and notification of outbreaks, rapid response, control of animal movements, and zoning or compartmentalisation. With regard to food safety, traceability can help to prevent food contamination and to respond promptly and effectively in the event of a crisis. Furthermore, it can help to eliminate unjustified trade barriers, since a sound traceability system provides trading partners with assurances on the safety of the products they import. Traceability techniques can provide additional guarantees as to the origin, type or organoleptic quality of food products.

There must be a means of linking the identification and traceability of live animals and the traceability of products of animal origin so as to achieve traceability throughout the animal production and food chain – from farm to fork –, taking into account the standards established by the OIE and the Codex Alimentarius Commission.

Also, in consultation with relevant governmental agencies and the private sector, the Veterinary Authority should establish a legal framework for the implementation and enforcement of animal identification and animal traceability in the country. This legal framework will include elements such as the objectives, the scope, the animal species involved, the organisational arrangements – including the choice of technologies used for identification and registration –, the obligations of the parties, confidentiality, information accessibility issues and methods of information exchange.

Various factors can influence the design of a national or regional animal identification and traceability system. Factors such as the animal and public health situation in the country, animal population parameters (such as species and breeds, numbers and geographic distribution), types of production, animal movement patterns, available technologies and their cost, as well as the way trade in animals and animal products is organised, must be taken into account at this level. Cost/benefit analysis and other economic, geographical and environmental considerations, as well as cultural aspects, should not be neglected when designing the system.

With the technical collaboration of experts involved in the work of the Codex Alimentarius Commission, the OIE is planning to organise an international conference on animal identification and traceability in Buenos Aires from 17 to 19 March 2009 . The aims of the conference will be to emphasise the importance and benefits of identification and traceability, to raise awareness of existing OIE and Codex standards, to determine future requirements for standards, and to provide advice and assistance on implementing standards, especially on behalf of developing countries. The participants will be from the national administrations concerned, animal research and production groups, and countries that have implemented effective traceability systems. Presentations will cover all sectors of livestock production as well as traceability of food products. The particular needs of both developed and developing countries will be addressed, as well as the different technologies of identification and traceability available on the market..

New technologies in animal production, such as animal cloning and transgenic animals, will create a need for additional arrangements to trace animals. Under certain circumstances authorities would have to trace every individual animal and animal product derived from these novel production methods. New technologies may also offer solutions. For example, DNA identification makes it possible to identify and monitor animals and animal products through to the retail level. Nonetheless, whether using high-tech or simple paper-based filing systems, the principles of traceability as defined in the Terrestrial Animal Health Code are universal, and apply equally in all situations.

As a tool for controlling disease in animals and food safety, a traceability system should enable an animal product to be traced back to the animal's farm of origin, and to be identified throughout the food production chain. Traceability constitutes the link between animal health, food safety and the organoleptic characteristics of food linked to its origin. The forthcoming conference in Buenos Aires will help all countries to progressively implement effective traceability systems compatible with their resources while respecting the standards of both the OIE and the Codex Alimentarius Commission.

Bernard Vallat


I also recommend that your read a book by Daniel Estulin entitled:
"The True Story of the Bilderberg Group"
http://www.amazon.com/True-Story-Bilderberg-Group/dp/0977795349


Animal ID/Premise ID and Codex Alimentarius = cozy bed-fellows ready to take away your ability to feed yourself, your community and your country.

The basic foundation of all this is to eliminate nationalism, eliminate soveriegnty of individual countries, and promote "farms without borders".

Except the farms will be controlled by those that our bankrupt nations owe money to. If you don't want to do the work for them, they have a few billion peasants to replace you.
 

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