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News :: Miscellaneous |
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SWINE AT THE TROUGH |
Current rating: 0 |
by Ken Midkiff
(No verified email address) |
23 Aug 2001
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Are you pro-agriculture OR are you pro-Corporate-agriculture?
There IS a difference and Ken Midkiff, an author with local roots, explains it.
Will Rep. Tim Johnson figure out the difference in time to save the family farm? ML |
The Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, is proposing a new set of rules to govern massive hog, poultry, beef and dairy operations. The proposed rules are intended to respond to the takeover by large corporations of livestock production -- and the pollution from thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions, of animals.
While Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations -- or CAFOs as the acronym would have it -- have long been covered by the federal Clean Water Act, it is only within the past eight to ten years that the pollution from these facilities has reached epidemic proportions. From Burlington, Vermont, to the Central Valley of California, the volumes of manure produced is fouling the air and water.
Currently, the federal regulations on these huge CAFOs don\'t amount to much. State agencies have been hamstrung by the insistence of rural politicians that these animal factories are \"agriculture\" and therefore immune from restrictions.
A cursory glance at the proposed regulations would indicate that the EPA has indeed taken the bull by the horns and is setting up a system that will hold the CAFO owners and operators accountable. But you don\'t need to dig very deep to discover loopholes big enough to drive a Tyson\'s semi-truck through.
Big Ag advocates have reacted as if someone stuck them with a cattle prod. From the National Pork Producers to the Poultry Federation to the American Farm Bureau Federation to local bought-and-paid-for agricultural faculty at land grant universities, the howls of outrage over these proposed regulations drown out reasonable discourse.
They moan that any regulation of \"agriculture\" will bring ultimate ruin on small farmers. But the groups doing the moaning are the very ones that precipitated the demise of small, independent producers.
The Poultry Federation is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Perdue, Tysons, RoseAcres and the other four or five poultry companies that control over 90 percent of broiler and egg production. These folks won\'t tolerate independent producers -- you either work for or contract with the BigChicken companies or you don\'t sell your products.
The facts are simple: Environmental laws and standards haven\'t run one farmer off the land. It\'s large corporations who are responsible for thousands of failures of the family farm. A century ago a majority of Americans were farmers, but today less than one percent make their living from agriculture. And with friends like the Farm Bureau, the Pork Producers, the Poultry Federation, and land grant schools of agriculture, farmers don\'t need enemies.
The EPA regulations represent a half-step forward: a hesitant attempt to require the largest CAFOs to observe federal clean water laws. The BigAg advocates have conducted a concerted effort to alarm EPA and the Bush Administration. It is highly unlikely -- even if the largest confinement operations are brought under the regulatory umbrella -- that compliance and enforcement efforts will follow.
Even though CAFOs are industrial facilities treating living things as so many units of production, it is likely that the EPA will be forced to acquiesce to the whims of corporations that have our national leaders in a chokehold. Meantime, these same corporations will be quietly merging with each other until our nation\'s food supply is controlled by one or two large companies.
Aided and abetted by agri-business commodity groups and their friends at land grant universities, a few large companies are playing King of the Mountain with the family farmer. And yet tragically, farmers are deluded into thinking that these are their friends, and that those trying to rein in the large companies are their enemies.
When the last family farmer signs the last contract with -- or sells out to -- Agriculture, Inc., it will be too late. We\'re almost there now.
Ken Midkiff is director of the Sierra Club in Missouri. He is a 1957 graduate of Unity High School, Tolono, Illinois and a 1971 graduate of Eastern Illinois University.
This article first appeared in Tom Paine.Com and is reprinted with permission. |
See also:
http://www.tompaine.com/opinion/2001/08/14/1.html
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