944
Mad Cows, Crazy Americans
And Endangered Species
It's too bad the term "Mad Cow" disease was thought up for bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE). Mad Cow is so much more dramatic than the mundane terms salmonella, E. coli, listeria, etc. and therefore so infinitely more conducive to creating hysteria among an American public that experiences withdrawal symptoms if it's not scared to death by politicians and the media several times a week. Listeria and E. coli don't stand a chance against mad cow when it comes to promoting fear.
Bovine spongiform encephalopathy just doesn't....well, it doesn't RESONATE on the
television screen. Mad cow conjures up horrible images for convenient use by ivory tower twerps who prefer free-range mountain lions and wolves to free-ranging cows. It doesn't matter if the threat is real.
Did Mexican officials rush in to destroy onion fields when people got sick and died from eating green onions from Mexico? No, of course they didn't.
Did the green onion market take a 25 percent hit? Absolutely not. But that's exactly what happened to U.S. beef producers.
During the week following the discovery of a BSE-infected cow in Washington state, more than a million people got sick from food they ate. 6,000 were so sick they were hospitalized. 100 died. But none of them died from eating a mad cow. Never have and likely never will.
Mad Cow disease as a danger to humans is far from the greatest food-related concern of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, whose focus is more on the 76 million illnesses, 325,000 hospitalizations and 5,000 deaths over the last year resulting from food-borne diseases that weren't Mad Cow.
Salmonella, for instance, caused at least 32,000 confirmed illnesses last year. According to a CDC spokesman, if Mad Cow had caused 32,000 illnesses, the uproar would probably have shut down the entire U.S. beef industry instead of just reducing its value by 25 percent.
Campylobacter, a bacterium associated with raw or undercooked poultry, causes about 2 million cases of diarrhea, nausea and vomiting annually and sometimes causes life-threatening infections or triggers rare immune-system responses. Listeria monocytogenes, cold-loving bacteria found in ready-to-eat lunchmeats and hot dogs, causes about 2,500 illnesses a year, and most of those people are so ill they are hospitalized. About 500 of them die, the CDC estimates.
A large share of the blame for the recent mad cow frenzy and the devastating losses to local producers lies smack at the door of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and U.S. trade policies that increasingly appear to insidiously promote foreign imports over domestic production. Why did USDA wait four days into the frenzy to announce that the infected cow, clearly identified by an ear tag, was Canadian?
HT R-CALF USA President Leo McDonnell said, "Had our export customers (and Americans) been informed that this cow was of Canadian origin, it is likely that they wouldn't have overreacted by closing their markets to U.S. beef, and they most certainly wouldn't have overreacted if we had country of origin labeling (COOL) in place," he said. R-CALF analysis shows that in 2001, the year the BSE infected cow was exported to the United States, Canadian exports of live cattle to the U.S. numbered 1.3 million. Over one million, or 78 percent of these cattle went directly to slaughter leaving 285,000 head in U.S. dairies, feedlots, farms or ranches. However, nearly 200,000, or over 15 percent of the total number imported were feeder cattle destined for slaughter in U.S. plants within 3 to 8 months. This leaves less than 85,000 head of cattle that may still be residing in the U.S. from the 2001 imports.
To date, the USDA has to the obvious detriment of regional family producers, steadfastly opposed all efforts to implement country of origin labeling on beef sold to the American people. After all, the goal of the Bush administration is to eliminate all barriers to trade in the Americas.
According to Christopher Adamo, writing in Sierra Times, "the four-day delay dealt a devastating blow to American beef growers, whose herds have lost nearly a quarter of their value because several countries have subsequently stopped importing American beef. But, by distracting attention from the real source of infected beef, this move aided and abetted the multinational corporate interests that... not coincidentally... overwhelmingly dominate and control meat packing in America." The USDA has taken the position that BSE is a "North American problem," says Adamo, thus taking the heat off Canada, which according to R-CALF, exports about nine times more beef to the U.S. than it imports. Agribusiness, of course, wants unfettered freedom to operate cheap-labor farms throughout the world and bring their meat and produce in to quietly mix with U.S.-produced food.
So far, U.S. government policies aid and abet agribusiness.
Perhaps it's time for the U.S. to take a serious look at its agricultural policies and practices and the profound effect the severing of U.S. populations from the family farm and ranch culture will increasingly have on American life, culture, food monitoring for safety, and national security. Already, U.S. News & World Report claims that imported food products are more than three times as likely as domestic food to contain harmful bacteria, yet the USDA and the FDA inspect less than two percent of the produce and meat that cross our borders. Food imports (about 50 percent of what Americans consume) are now virtually out of control for checking, with no coordinated system for inspecting them.
In addition, says U.S. News, an estimated 50,000 nonnative invasive plant and insect species that come in with our food imports cost the country $137 billion a year, "affecting both our agriculture and our health."
The U.S. is growing by approximately 3 million a year and loses 3 million acres of farm land annually as local farms and ranches give up their land to government, development, conservation easements, and multinational factory farms.
Range magazine says that as the rich environmentalist groups pursue their agenda of keeping people bottled up in towns and cities, they've been cutting sweetheart deals with themselves to buy prime rural acreage at deeply discounted prices and keeping it or selling it to the government to "preserve" at hugely inflated prices. Local zoning and a nationwide implementation of forced planning under the guise of beneficial "growing smarter" laws are resulting in what Range Magazine calls "the biggest intergenerational transfer (to wealthy individuals, organizations and government) of U.S. land in history."
Families who have owned historic land for generations are faced with obscene obstructions in deeding to their children and grandchildren a piece of land on the family (gone out of business) farm to build a home.
This insidious ploy is "an enemy that uses the fiction of smart growth to cheat succeeding generations out of the family estate," Range says.
"Smart growth" creates a few winners and many losers whose land value is destroyed.
Though most don't realize it, the most endangered species in this country settled by pioneers who pulled themselves up by the bootstraps, are those neighborhood, regional, U.S. farms, ranches, shops and manufacturers who created local communities and economies.
Universities play this destructive game, too. Judd Silvka wrote in the Arizona Republic that for 4-H young people, the reality, responsibility and the truth that all life is connected to and dependent upon the earth... is a thing of the past.
Universities must produce college graduates for today's jobs, and there is little hope for a livelihood on the land that supports us. Colleges that once supported education about basic essentials are struggling to "move up in a cutthroat world of research and technology. These days pigs and cows are out. Nanotechnology and biomedical sciences are in," Silvka said.
The local farms and ranches where once rural families taught their own children and their kids' (town) friends hard work and the facts of life have disappeared across much of America, primarily put out of business by their own government's policies. Now our rural towns are filled with government jobs, too many fat, lazy kids, long food and welfare lines, pornographic, violent and vacuous TV, and a troubled teen crime, gang and suicide rate that the U.S. never saw during its poorest times of hardship.
Families, businesses and governments alike are fueled by debt. We are not producing original wealth. That kind of wealth only comes from the land, and we are busy recycling and spending the original wealth once created by Americans.
Protectionism is a dirty word in our culture, but no civilization whose policies transferred wealth and importance from the land to cities, and production to consumption, has ever remained great. The Wal-Marts, Home Depots and factory farms may appear to be the salvation of U.S. citizens now, but the exchange of wealth from the holdings of millions of everyday Americans into the hands of a few is a sure prescription for eventual Third World status. All the nanotechnology and biomedical sciences in the world can't save us from that in the long run. The U.S. technology industry, like all the rest of us, is growing far too dependent on unfriendly nations and conscienceless corporations for the most essential needs for survival.
I fear for our nation if we don't change our present reality-challenged priorities.
Payson.cc © 2004 Carrol Cox
Payson Arizona Editorial and Opinions on National USA / World / and Local News Issues