Farming & Your Freedom

Art imitates life, they say. Sometimes life imitates art. Last week, it really did. The NBC drama "West Wing" aired an episode in which the national security advisor to the president heard of "contingency" plans to attack our very good neighbor to the north. Oh, Canada! Oh, my!

The premise was that a bunch of drunken Montana cattlemen out hunting were a bit over the border and were noisily pursuing game in Canada. They were arrested because local Canadian cattlemen were sore about embargoes on Canadian beef placed after the first BSE scare. Little did the producers of the show know what would take place in real time this past few weeks.

The fictional national security advisor, of course, tried to prevail with a calmer, cooler head and suggest that there must be peaceful, neighborly, diplomatic ways to coax the Canadians into releasing the belligerent Americans. The military guys deep in the White House situation room, however, had other ideas: they were actually entertaining implementation of a contingency plan for military action against the Maple Leafs. Yikes!

Real life entered the fray last week, albeit a bit less jingoistically, when the U.S. Senate voted to stop the USDA from re-opening the border and allowing Canadian beef to come into the U.S. A Montana federal judge had granted a request for a preliminary injunction against the opening, but the USDA had wanted to open things up under its "minimal risk" rules. New Ag Secretary Mike Johanns had delayed trade of Canadian cattle over 30 months old in early February, but the border was set to re-open March 7.

No cattle have crossed the border since May of 2003 when the Canadians said they had found their first case of BSE. Senators figured the border should remain closed to cattle because our mandatory country-of-origin labeling was not in place.

American cattlemen, quite naturally, are scared to death of Mad Cow and figure it would only be a matter of time until the disease took hold here, since Canada has not implemented a cogent plan to contain the spread of BSE and has not, according to National Farmers Union President Dave Frederickson, "achieved compliance with its ruminant feed ban."

Farm state senators supported the bill, and Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin (D) supported the resolution by saying, "It is critical we restore beef and cattle trade with our trading partners, but we must do it right." Harkin said he felt the USDA's rule is "flawed," and the problems need to be addressed. he and other farm state senators believed the USDA approach would have resulted in major economic hardships for U.S. beef packers.

The Montana judge meanwhile had made it clear that he believed the USDA had established a goal of re-opening the border for live Canadian beef and then attempted to work backwards to support and justify the goal. Federal District Court Judge Richard Cebull, according to a copyrighted article by the Meredith Corporation, cited the USDA for not providing information that the agency had "fulfilled its statutory mandate to protect the health and welfare of the people of the United States."

The judge said evidence was clear that Canada had not conducted testing for BSE that would accurately assess the rate of the disease infection there. He further stated that if testing so far had been truly representative of the Canadian herd, a BSE prevalence greater than 5.5 cases per million head would put that nation on a par with many European nations that have a major BSE problem.

How will it all be resolved? Who can say, but we can only hope that there isn't anyone deep in the bowels of the White House looking at any "contingency plans."

I'll see ya!