For liberals who have a familiar list of issues they consider politically urgent, it's time to look at farming issues in that light.
Farming issues reveal a worldwide movement by multinationals to control all food, animals, water, land. NAIS is a totalitarian plan to oversee every farm animal in the country under the guise of food safety (though it contributes nothing to that safety and skirts the need to investigate and clean up the corporate feedlots, animal factories and slaughterhouses), with a data bank of global tracking information on small farmer and ranchers's to be run by and stored with corporations, and intolerable costs borne by farmers and ranchers, along with loss of all privacy and independence, and including penalties that are massive and destructive.
The sustainable agriculture movement, the independence of our farming and ranching communities, and our democracy itself are at stake with NAIS, which is, incidentally being pushed by Monsanto (and the big meat packers).
It is time to treat farming issues with the enormous seriousness they entail. Our lives all depend on independent farmers and ranchers having freedom to operate without crushing government controls (that favor multinationals), and to be able to sell directly to customers with government interference, or to compete fairly in a national and international marketplace against multinationals.
Also Request Oversight Hearing to Investigate NAIS Activities
Washington, D.C. – In formal correspondence sent today to the leaders of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs and the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, two national groups and nine others – all from different states – requested that Congress immediately halt any further advancement of the National Animal Identification System (NAIS) and to conduct an oversight hearing on the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA’s) NAIS activities to carefully and deliberately investigate the full ramifications of USDA’s NAIS-related actions and proposals.
“USDA’s procedures for advancing and implementing NAIS are improper, if not outright unlawful, and yet, Congress continues to appropriate funding for NAIS, subjecting U.S. farmers and ranchers to extraordinary pressure from USDA to assist the agency in its implementation of an unproven, questionable and potentially cost-prohibitive program that Congress itself has not seen fit to authorize,” said R-CALF USA President/Region VI Director Max Thornsberry.
The groups – R-CALF USA, South Dakota Stockgrowers Association, Independent Cattlemen of Nebraska, Independent Cattlemen of Iowa, Independent Cattlemen of Wyoming, Buckeye Quality Beef Association, Oregon Livestock Producers Association, Colorado Independent CattleGrowers (sic) Association, Kansas Cattlemen’s Association, Independent Beef Association of North Dakota and the Cornucopia Institute – assert that:
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