I’m sure you remember the peanut butter scandal that resulted in several deaths and dozens of illnesses across America, and you will recall that Peanut Corporation of America executives knew their product was contaminated with deadly Salmonella when they shipped it out. You may also remember the millions of pounds of ground beef, and the tomatoes that caused death and illness all over the country before the peanut butter disaster. So you may be wondering what’s going on. At first, I suspected it might have something to do with NAFTA, that food produced in Mexico might not be subject to the same safety standards as in America. But I fingered the wrong culprit this time. An organization that looks into this kind of thing, a group called “The Peace Team,” offers a different explanation. Here’s what they say:
When you ask where is all this horrible filth coming from, with over a million cases of Salmonella in the U.S. alone every year, the answer is self-evident. It’s the huge factory farms that overflow with seas of untreated animal waste, that then spill into our food supply, including through our agricultural …. fields.
The Peace Team is crusading against a plan by these giant corporations to force the implanting of computer chips in “literally every farm animal in the country, except on their own factory farms. The plan was dreamed up by the National Institute of Animal Agriculture, a corporate consortium consisting of Monsanto, industrial meat producers such as Cargill and Tyson, and surveillance companies such Viatrace, AgInfoLink, and Digital Angel. It benefits agribusiness, biotech, and surveillance companies at the expense of the American small farmer.
It is absolutely nothing but a further attempt to drive small family farms out of business, who in fact are our safest source of reliably clean food now. The proposed National Animal Identification System would force even the smallest healthy farms to buy expensive new computer tracking equipment, and potentially would subject them to gestapo-like tactics by the USDA if they are in even slight technical non-compliance. And all this just to fatten the pockets of the RFID chip manufacturers, and to make it look like something is being done to make our food safer.
The plan is currently being pushed through Congress, and I don’t have to tell you how much influence big agricultural corporations have in Washington. They spend untold millions of dollars on lobbying and campaign contributions. That’s one reason you hear of multimillionaires receiving farm subsidies while living in such faraway places as Saudi Arabia. You might want to take a minute to help the beleaguered small farmers of America. Check out the Peace Team’s page at:
