- Creekstone Farms is a little slaughterhouse in Kansas
with an idea that would have had Adam Smith's mouth watering. Faced with
consumers who remain skittish over mad cow disease ñ especially
in Japan ñ Creekstone decided that all its beef would be tested
for mad cow, a radical departure from the random testing done by other
companies. It was a case study in free-market meatpacking entrepreneurship.
That is, until the Bush administration's Department of Agriculture blocked
the enterprise, apparently at the behest of Creekstone's competitors.
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- According to The Washington Post, Creekstone invested
$500,000 to build the first mad cow testing lab in a U.S. slaughterhouse
and hired chemists and biologists to staff the operation. The only thing
it needed was testing kits. That's where the company ran into trouble.
By law, the Department of Agriculture controls the sale of the kits, and
it refused to sell Creekstone enough to test all of its cows. The USDA
said that allowing even a small meatpacking company to test every cow it
slaughtered would undermine the agency's official position that random
testing was scientifically adequate to assure safety.
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- What it didn't say was that the rest of the meatpacking
industry was adamantly opposed to such testing, which is expensive, and
had no desire to compete with Creekstone's fully certified beef.
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- The Agriculture Department's Creekstone decision reveals
the best thinking of Soviet central planning: The government shoots the
innovator to preserve market stability. Though President Bush invokes free-market
principles when it comes to industry downsizing, outsourcing jobs, media
mergers and energy deregulation, those principles apparently have their
limits when a company seeks to become an industry leader in consumer protection.
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- Creekstone is a model operation in an industry that often
seems medieval. Its high-quality Black Angus beef was developed to reduce
the use of animals that have been given antibiotics. It pays high wages,
employs humane slaughtering techniques and maintains a slow enough production
line to guarantee worker safety and to ensure that animals are dead before
they are butchered. Although the largest U.S. meatpacking companies have
fought regulations that would force such practices, Creekstone ñ
which has been in business since 1995 ñ has proved that some consumers
will pay more for such policies and the premium product that results.
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- The appearance of mad cow disease in the U.S. herd hit
Creekstone's small operation hard. Much of its market was in Japan, where
all cows are tested and where U.S. beef is banned because American meatpackers
don't follow the same policy. So Creekstone's chief operating officer,
Bill Fielding, announced he would voluntarily test the 300,000 cows his
company slaughters annually. Absent the test, Fielding says Creekstone
may face bankruptcy and have to lay off its 790 workers.
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- The Department of Agriculture seems to have only one
purpose in preventing Creekstone from testing ñ appeasing the big
slaughterhouses. The USDA has a long history of doing the bidding of the
meatpacking industry at the expense of the public. Indeed, in many academic
studies, the department is presented as a textbook example of the problem
of "agency capture," wherein an agency becomes so identified
with the companies it regulates that it becomes an extension of those companies.
The allegations of agency capture have been magnified in the Bush administration,
in which former industry executives hold key regulatory positions.
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- When mad cow disease appeared in the United States, the
department again took the industry line and resisted calls for added testing.
Only after worldwide criticism did it reluctantly make such modest rule
changes as requiring slaughterhouses to discard "downed" animals
ñ cows so sick that they had to be dragged into slaughterhouses
to be butchered. Most Americans were surprised to learn that the department
had ever allowed such animals into the food supply in the first place.
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- The administration may be correct that testing every
animal in the United States is unnecessary and not cost-effective. But
why not let Creekstone find out what the market will bear? The position
of the administration is an affront to anyone who believes in the free
market. It's as if the Department of Transportation refused to allow Volvo
to add air bags just to keep the pressure off other carmakers.
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- - Jonathan Turley is a law professor at George Washington
Law School. He wrote this for the Los Angeles Times.
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- © 2004 Journal Gazette and wire service sources.
All Rights Reserved.
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- http://www.fortwayne.com/mld/journalgazette/news/editorial/8517237.htm
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