Protect Our Food Supply – Stop National Animal ID

by Judith McGeary

Published January 13, 2009 @ 06:07AM PT

A policy posing one of the greatest threats to local and sustainable agriculture is the National Animal Identification System (NAIS). Under NAIS, anyone who owns even one livestock animal will have to register their property, tag each animal (in most cases with electronic tags), and report a long list of movements to a database within 24 hours. This issue is among the ideas being voted on for the Top 10 Ideas for Change in America:

Vote to stop NAIS here.

NAIS will drive local family and organic farms out of business and impose burdens on everyone from recreational horse owners to people in poverty who are trying to raise food for themselves. It will not stop animal disease or improve food safety. NAIS will only enrich the corporations that already control most of our food supply.

NAIS was first the brainchild of multinational companies seeking to open foreign markets to US beef. In the 1980s and 1990s, they worked with technology companies and agribusiness associations to develop a plan to require electronic identification of every single livestock animal in the country. They then convinced USDA to take the program on after the agency was given expanded powers in the wake of 9/11.

USDA’s original NAIS plan, published in 2005, called for every single livestock animal – including those kept as pets (such as potbellied pigs or riding horses) or for people’s personal food supply – to be registered, tagged (in most cases using an implantable microchip or radio frequency identification (RFID) tag), and for the owner to report all movements on or off the property within 24 hours. Covered animals include horses, chickens, cows, sheep, goats, pigs, llamas, alpacas, and other livestock and poultry.

Think about it: Every gift of a baby lamb, every grade school that teaches kids about baby chicks, every kid in a 4-H show, every trail ride and local rodeo, every grandmother with a few laying hens – all of these people and activities will be subject to extensive government surveillance. And the databases would be controlled by private for-profit companies making fat profits at our expense.

The agribusiness companies that wrote the plan made sure they had a loophole. Factory confinement farms, raising thousands of chickens or hogs in a building filled with their own waste, will be able to use “group identification.” Yet an organic pastured poultry farmer will be stuck tagging each chicken.

The USDA has not done a cost-benefit analysis. Based on estimates from Australia and England, NAIS could cost anywhere from $30-$69 per animal on average. The costs include the tags, the labor and equipment needed to tag each animal and file reports of the movements within 24 hours, and the massive databases needed to track over 100 million animals. Factory farms can use group ID to avoid many of the costs, while small farmers could face even higher costs because of economies of scale.

With a profit margin of less than $100 on most cattle, sheep or goats selling for less than that, and chickens selling for just a few dollars, these costs are prohibitive for small farmers and individual animal owners.

After public outcry, USDA changed its tune to claim that NAIS would be “voluntary at the federal level.” Yet the agency used both carrots and sticks to push states to implement NAIS. Parts of the program have been implemented on a mandatory basis in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Indiana, while other states have used coercion, bribery, and deception to increase participation. The USDA recently wrote a memo that clearly makes the first stage of NAIS (the registration of people’s property) mandatory. Indeed, the earlier version of the memo called for labeling out those who did not “volunteer” to register, so there would be a list of resisters. Under pressure from USDA, several states have adopted laws authorizing state implementation of NAIS that include heavy fines and even criminal penalties.

President-Elect Obama can easily stop this program. He should direct the new USDA Undersecretary of Marketing and Regulatory Programs to revoke the existing memos and guidance documents, and stop signing cooperative agreements with industry entities and the states for NAIS implementation. These actions would have tremendous positive impacts on small farmers and poor communities across the country, as well as promoting environmental and human health by supporting the local, sustainable agriculture movement.

Please support a healthy and safe food supply that provides a truly sustainable future for us all. NAIS works against that because it:

1. Financially harms local, organic farms, which are critical to our food security and the environment

2. Will not improve food safety, since the tracking ends at the time of slaughter, while e.coli and salmonella contaminations usually come from slaughter or storage conditions

3. Deprives consumers of the choice to buy from small, local farmers and obtain pastured meats and eggs.

4. Is unnecessary, because we already have working programs for tracking commercial livestock

5. Is unconstitutional and violates people’s privacy, property rights, and the religious beliefs of groups such as the Amish

6. Wastes taxpayer dollars: USDA has spent over $100 million simply to implement the first stage of the program for a fraction of the nation’s farms

7. Helps Big Business at the expense of Main Street – Agribusiness corporations created this program to price small farming operations out of business, furthering their monopolies.

Mainstream agriculture has led to corporate control of the food supply, pollution of our air and water, poisons in our foods, failing rural communities, greater dependence on foreign oil, and a disease epidemic in this country. The local sustainable agriculture movement can reverse these trends. But government policies that promote factory farms at the expense of sustainable farms threaten our ability to make the change we need. Please help bring attention to this issue by voting to stop the NAIS.

For more information about NAIS and what else you can do to help protect sustainable farms from this threat, go to Farm and Ranch Freedom.

(Photo credit: Irish Typepad on Flickr.)