The Complete Patient

One of the things that is especially troubling about the experience of the Smiths is that it isn’t the exception. Rather, it fits into a broader pattern of government abusiveness and sneakiness on the agriculture/food front.

I make these observations from the perspective of having spent a fair amount of time over the last few weeks investigating the National Animal Identification System (NAIS), in connection with an article I helped write in The Nation. The difficulties being encountered on the raw milk front, I am convinced, are part and parcel of the NAIS battle.

Anyone who seeks to operate outside the agribusiness factory system is a threat to the big plan now being implemented. In investigating NAIS, I was struck by how, time and again, state and federal bureaucrats have refused to take no for an answer.

Huge numbers of farmers and consumers are dead set against this program, yet the bureaucrats refuse to back off. In fact, no matter how vehement the opposition, or how badly they seem to be beaten off, they continue to come back, sometimes in other guises. In Texas, they seemed to be beaten back, and suddenly, NAIS is being implemented via a press release. In liberal Massachusetts, farmer data is being inputted into U.S. Department of Agriculture databases—unless farmers take the initiative to opt out. Just like California sneaks through legislation to attack raw milk producers.

The examples go on and on. This for a program billed by the USDA as “voluntary.” (To sbarackman’s comment on my previous post that, “Under NAIS when you sign up you no longer have full title to your property,” I don’t believe that is currently the case; but that fact that many people believe it to be true indicates how high the fear factor is.)

I take two messages:

--The bureaucrats are running things. Congress hasn’t voted, and in states where reps have voted, they’ve tended to vote against NAIS. Arizona enacted legislation against making it mandatory. In Missouri, voters replaced a senator over NAIS. But it’s still not been debated in the U.S. Congress, nor in most state legislatures. I don’t know if the legislators are abdicating because they don’t want to be identified with taking a stand on this controversial subject, or the bureaucrats have just taken control.

--Most depressing, the never-ending pressure to spread NAIS is just more evidence of how monied interests have taken control, and are consolidating with a vengeance. Their attitude isn’t unlike guerrillas fighting in an insurgency—we will fight as long as necessary to achieve our goals. In the U.S., the fighters are hired hands, lobbyists, whose main goal is financial rather than political, and whose main resource is endless cash rather than fighters.

Money makes these people highly motivated—the big difference from insurgents is that the hired hands are fighting for power and wealth rather than their lives. So they can fight for as long as it takes because they have comfortable weekly paychecks coming in, while the opposition has to fight back on the fly—during free time away from tending the farm, or other job. While the opposition is tending the farm or job, the pro-NAIS forces are scheming to come up with still other ways to accomplish their goals. It’s a depressing way to fight a war.

It's terrifying as well. The same band of people who are forcing America into NAIS also control countless other areas of our lives. The main hope I see in cases like that of the Smiths and the two California raw milk dairies, together with the many anti-NAIS groups, is that farmers and their supporters are finally learning to organize in meaningful opposition. Will this organizing be strong enough, and in enough time? If it truly is just the start of the opposition struggle, and can build up additional momentum, and has enough patience and money, maybe so. The outcome remains very much in doubt.