I wonder if any of those rural Americans who voted for Bush and the Congressional Republicans will suffer even a scintilla of cognitive dissonance over these two blows to the country's already staggering rural economy.
Telling consumers where their meat, fruit and vegetables came from seemed such a good idea to U.S. ranchers and farmers in competition with imports that Congress two years ago ordered the food industry to do it. But meatpackers and food processors fought the law from the start, and newly emboldened
Republicans now plan to repeal it before Thanksgiving...
Food processors and other opponents of mandatory labeling say they are amenable to voluntary labels...
The House Agriculture Committee approved legislation this year to substitute a voluntary system for the current law.
The issue divides cattlemen and other livestock producers. Many of the bigger livestock and feedlot operations, as well as food processors, do not want mandatory labeling.
Producers in favor of mandatory labels believe consumers will prefer U.S.-grown food over foreign imports. The law requires companies to put country-of-origin labels on meat, vegetables and fruit.
One could conclude that it's just good economics to favor those agricultural producers who benefit from an economy of scale, thereby lowering the costs of bringing food to our tables. And voluntary labeling and self-regulation will provide for safe foods, right? Yeah, maybe, were it not for those pesky problems with industrialized food production like...oh, I don't know, the food processing industry's reluctance to accept regulations that would better protect against the spread of diseases that turn your brain into Swiss cheese:
A second case of mad cow disease may have turned up in the United States but meat from the suspect animal has not entered the food chain, Agriculture Department officials said Thursday.
The officials released few details and refused to say where the possibly diseased animal was found. They said it would be four to seven days before more could be confirmed, a delay that livestock industry representatives said would cause turmoil in the beef market.
Mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, attacks an animal's nervous system. People who eat food contaminated with BSE can contract a rare disease that is nearly always fatal, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease...
The wait to find out more about this possible new case of BSE has "put the entire industry really in limbo," said John McBride, a spokesman for the Livestock Marketing Association, based in Kansas City, Mo.
"With final results not being available for four to seven days, it's going to disrupt the livestock market. Buyers are going to be reluctant to buy, sellers are going to be reluctant to put their livestock on the market," he said. "The effect on the market could be profound...
In the only confirmed U.S. case, a Canadian-born Holstein was found to have been infected, but just that one case caused Japan and more than three dozen other countries to refuse U.S. beef. That hurt U.S. export sales and the farm economy.
Bush administration officials are now focused on trying to get those bans lifted and with establishing a national identification system for tracking livestock and poultry from birth through the production chain.
Such a system has worried producers who prefer to keep their records confidential or run a voluntary ID clearinghouse that would provide government officials with limited access.
So, Congress is going to renege on plans to require country-of-origin labels on food and rely on the food processing industry to police themselves with voluntary labels, while some of those same food processors are fighting mandatory tracking of a dangerous and highly contagious disease that could wipe out our livestock exports and spread a horrible disease to humans?
[Also, notice that the reason that USDA even tests for the disease is because it's necessary for exporting livestock; we might avoid eating American-produced meat infected with BSE thanks to regulations the Japanese and EU countries imposed to protect their own citizens.]
It's bad enough for the effect that problems with food have on us as consumers. But it's maddening that that so much of rural America, especially in livestock-producing states of the Plains and Rockies, still vote so heavily Republican. Let's see how good the Republicans look to people in Nebraska if they're exposed as having spent more time protecting rural Nebraska from non-threats like gay marriage and the supposed decadence of the Coasts, when the greatest threats to their way of life actually came from contagions in livestock herds and cheap foodstuffs imported from Chile and China. [Unfortunately it's probably asking too much for significant numbers of rural Republican voters to turn from a party uninterested in whether Americans should expect a disease-free chicken in every pot.]
Oh, by the way, for those who slagged Tom Daschle and think we're better off with him out of Congress, ponder this: he's the food labeling bill's biggest supporter, but with his defeat, it no longer has a strong enough backer to prevent its demise. Keep that in mind the next time you're wondering whether those strawberries you're washing are from Mexico and whether they may contain e-coli.