- "The late Ed Abbey had it right when he declared,
"The rancher - with a few honorable exceptions - is a man who strings
barbed wire all over the range; drills wells and bulldozes stock ponds;
drives off elk and antelope and bighorn sheep; poisons coyotes and prairie
dogs; shoots eagles, bears, and cougars on sight; supplants the native
grasses with tumbleweed, snakeweed, povertyweed, cow shit, anthills, mud,
dust, and flies. And then leans back and grins at the TV cameras and talks
about how he loves the American West."
-
-
- WASHINGTON, D.C. -- When
it comes to politics you just can't beat the cattlemen for bellyaching.
They are forever running around Washington, wanting to pay lower fees for
overgrazing the public range or demanding cutbacks in environmental laws
that might actually slightly intrude on their operations, and like everyone
else under the big Republican tent, babbling on about the wonders of the
"free market."
-
- In what will surely rank as cattle ranchers' biggest
and stupidest p.r. campaign, some Amarillo ranchers sued Oprah because
in 1996 she had Howard Lyman, a former rancher and food activist, as a
guest on her show. The ranch owners think Lyman is a dangerous nut. He
told Oprah how the beef men were feeding cattle ground up bits and pieces
of other cattle, including stuff from sick cows, and warned it was only
a matter of time before Mad Cow Disease hit the U.S.
-
- The cattlemen flipped out. Paul Engler, owner of Cactus
Feeders Inc. filed suit, claiming that Oprah and Lyman hurt the cattle
futures market and charging that they violated a Texas law that forbids
"knowingly making false statements" about agricultural business.
Claiming a right to free speech, Oprah won, but the beef men nonetheless
insisted you could rest assured that Mad Cow could never come to the U.S.
-
- It is unclear whether the government's ban on "downers,"
animals that can't walk, from going into the food supply will actually
keep this meat from being consumed. Downers may well end up being fed to
other animals. And the USDA's testing program applies to only a few thousand
head of cattle, when there are millions of animals going into the feed
supply. Currently the USDA tests some 20,000 animals a year out of 29 million
steers and heifers slaughtered.
-
- Since 1997 the government has supposedly been implementing
a ban on the use of animal parts in food supplements given to cattle. Factory
farming necessitates weaning the calf from the mother shortly after birth
and feeding it protein supplements, which often contain parts of other
cattle and other animals. But on January 31, the Washington Post reported
that the General Accounting Office, the organization which carries out
investigations for Congress, has criticized enforcement of the ban as lax.
-
- --------------------------
-
- What the cattlemen detest most is the meat inspection
system. The story of how Upton Sinclair muckraked the slaughterhouses some
one hundred years ago and Teddy Roosevelt jumped in and fixed them all
up is pretty much fiction. The simple fact is the meat inspection system
isn't any good and anybody who even attempts to stand up to the Big Boy
ranchers does so at his or her peril. Look what happened to Bill Lehman,
who throughout the early 1990s worked as a meat inspector at Sweetgrass,
Montana, a busy port of entry for Canadian beef. By his own count, Lehman
himself rejected "up to 2.3 million pounds of contaminated or mislabeled
imports annually." The reasons, according to Lehman, included "pus-filled
abscesses, sticky layers of bacteria leaving a stench, obvious fecal contamination,
stains, metal shavings, blood, bruises, hair, hide, chemical residues,
salmonella, added substances, and advanced disease symptoms."
-
- After some children died from an E. coli outbreak in
the 90s, Lehman told about his work: "I merely walk to the back of
the truck. That's all I'm allowed to do. Whether there's boxed meat or
carcasses in the truck, I can't touch the boxes. I can't open the boxes.
I can't use a flashlight. I can't walk into the truck. I can only look
at what is visible in the back of the trailer." He told one interviewer
how he did his inspections: "I've just inspected over 80,000 pounds
of meat (boxed beef rounds and boxed boneless beef briskets) on two trucks.
I wasn't running or hurrying either. One was bound for Santa Fe Springs,
California, the other for San Jose, California. I just stamped on their
paperwork 'USDA Inspected and Passed' in 45 seconds."
-
- The revelations by Lehman, who died in 1998, drove the
ranchers and their USDA buddies nuts. They said he was a troublemaker and,
because he thought free-trade laws made matters worse, a protectionist.
He was ordered to retire, face being fired or transfer to another location.
He retired, saying he was "just tired of the whole thing." But
he fought the USDA until he died.
-
- But Lehman was far from the only critic. "Adequate
inspection on the border has been lacking for years, said Mike Callicrate,
an outspoken Kansas rancher, especially on the topic of the USDA's Food
Safety and Inspection Service.
-
- What many people don't understand is how minimal meat
inspection is. Here's a typical instance, described by an Iowa farmer:
He buys cows or heifers at auction, where they have been certified as having
met health requirements - not because of first-hand inspection but because
of the seller's history as a "good guy." The farmer proceeds
to feed the cattle corn, sometimes with a vegetable-based additive, and
in two years sells them to a feed lot or maybe a local butcher. There is
no check on the health of the animals. Approval for sale is again based
on the history of the farm. What about sick cows? Say a cow falls down
- he's called a "downer." According to this farmer, a vendor
often is called; he'll send a truck to pick up the animal, kill it (if
it is still alive), and sell the parts into the meat system. If the farmer
spots a sick cow in his herd, he gets rid of it quick as he can. He doesn't
go through the rigmarole of testing it through a veterinarian, which takes
time and costs money. He just gets rid of the animal and keeps mum about
what happened.
-
- --------------------------
-
- Weak laws and weak enforcement are only part of the reason
for the slipshod inspection system. It's a fact that farmers and ranchers
are under terrific pressure to make a go of it. As Al Krebs, an activist
who edits the Ag Biz Examiner, told the Voice, "If dairy farmers were
getting a fair price for what they produce, they probably wouldn't feel
it necessary to squeeze every last penny out of their herd, such as sending
'downers' off to the marketplace." Dairy farmers in the Seattle-Tacoma
area are getting as little as $1 per gallon for their milk when it probably
costs about $1.40 to produce that gallon, says Krebs, and the farmers may
have to carry a debt of anywhere from $1,500 to $2,000 per cow. But, he
points out, consumers in the Seattle-Tacoma area were paying, as of last
July, $3.52 per gallon for whole milk, the highest prices anywhere in the
nation.
-
- The beef industry is more centralized. The actual economics
of beef production are determined not by any free market, but by a highly
concentrated industry. Four meatpackers - IBP, ConAgra, Excel (a subsidiary
of Cargill), and National Beef - control 85 percent of the market. Work
in the slaughterhouses can be extremely dangerous, and it's hardly worth
it. An investigation by Mother Jones a couple of years ago found that slaughterhouses
pay among the lowest wages and have turnover rates so high that every year
practically the entire work force has to be hired anew. Most of the workers
are illegal immigrants who often don't speak English and can't read.
-
- --------------------------
-
- This screwed-up system does produce the desired results
once in a while: Bad meat is found and then recalled. Or is it?
-
- A study by the Center for Public Integrity, a D.C. watchdog
group, found that only 43 percent of all meat products recalled by their
manufacturers from 1990-1997 was recovered. The rest of the meat - some
17 million pounds - was eaten by unsuspecting consumers. Yet Congress fought
off efforts by the Secretary of Agriculture during that time to get the
authority to issue mandatory recalls of contaminated meat.
-
- The investigation found that during the 1990s the highly
exclusive meat business spent $41 million financing political campaigns
of Congress members, more than one third of them from House or Senate agriculture
committees. Among them: the majority and minority leaders of the Senate
(Trent Lott and Tom Daschle), the speaker of the House and the House minority
leader (Newt Gingrich and Dick Gephardt), and six past or present chairmen
or ranking minority members of the Senate and House agriculture committees.
-
- The cattle industry during that period employed 124 lobbyists
to work the Hill, 28 of them previously either lawmakers or aides to lawmakers.
And it worked. "During the escalating public health crisis of the
past decade," the Center reported, "the food industry has managed
to kill every bill that has promised meaningful reform." In lieu of
any serious rulemaking, the Clinton administration struck a weak-ass deal
with the industry to allow cattlemen to do their own inspections and label
their records "trade secrets" so the public can't look at them.
-
- And the problem goes even beyond the threat that contaminated
meat poses to public health. Our so-called factory farm system is a major
pollutant; massive feedlots foul our water sources around the country.
An EPA report from March '98 noted: "Agricultural practices in the
United States are estimated to contribute to the impairment of 60 percent
of the nation's surveyed rivers and streams; 50 percent of the nation's
surveyed lakes, ponds, and reservoirs; and 34 percent of the nation's estuaries."
-
-
- The late Ed Abbey had it right when he declared, "The
rancher - with a few honorable exceptions - is a man who strings barbed
wire all over the range; drills wells and bulldozes stock ponds; drives
off elk and antelope and bighorn sheep; poisons coyotes and prairie dogs;
shoots eagles, bears, and cougars on sight; supplants the native grasses
with tumbleweed, snakeweed, povertyweed, cow shit, anthills, mud, dust,
and flies. And then leans back and grins at the TV cameras and talks about
how he loves the American West."
-
- - Additional Reporting: Ashley Glacel, Alicia Ng
-
- Copyright © 2003 Village Voice Media, Inc., 36 Cooper
Square, New York, NY 10003 The Village Voice and Voice are registered trademarks.
All rights reserved.
-
- http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0353/mondo1.php
|
