Joining Forces against National Animal Identification System

By Dick Stevens

A positive move has been made here in Virginia, an effort to fight and stop the United States Department of Agriculture's (USDA) outrageous plan called the National Animal Identification System. The Virginia Poultry Breeders Association (VPBA) joined forces with the Virginia Independent Consumers and Farmers (VICFA) to oppose the NAIS.

In order to show how serious the VPBA is in opposition to the USDA's NAIS, VPBA's members voted unanimously, at a special meeting held in August 2006 to make a major contribution to VICFA's newly established National Independent Consumers and Farmers Advocates Fund (NICFA Fund) to help fight this NAIS plan in all states! The donation made by the VPBA will be distributed over a five-month period and will total $5,000.

As one of the VPBA members, Dick Stevens, put it: "Why should small backyard farmers of all types be forced to comply with the USDA-NAIS requirements, when we know the true reason for this bizarre problem is so global trade and the industrial agriculture can increase their profit levels.

"Anyone who has analyzed the 90-some pages of the USDA-NAIS proposed plan realizes that it does nothing to prevent or control most disease. In reviewing this plan, you find no information to outlaw or restrict the unethical farming practices that are conducted by industrial agriculture today. By the way, these industrial agriculture animals and poultry are the most disease-prone in this county."

VPBA agrees with the VICFA's NICFA Fund statement: "We oppose any government funded or managed National Identification System"

VICFA says if a program is needed to open foreign markets as the USDA claims, the marketplace will provide the system and the government should not force family farms to pay for a program mainly supported by industrial agriculture interests. VICFA member Deborah Stockton summed up NAIS as, "Just another piece of USDA corporate welfare."