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Are The Raw Milk Lawsuits A Worry?
By Leon Stein
8-9-11
 
The public is outraged at the two armed raids on an organic coop in California, even before knowing that California is also giving cease and desist orders to goat farmers, and having little idea that the FDA-approved pasteurized is contaminated with Crohn's bacterium.
 
The FDA has also moved to stop the interstate transport of raw milk.  Live over the border from a state with raw milk and have none available in your state, and the FDA wants to prevent you from bringing that milk home, though it is legal to buy in one state and legal to drink it in your own.  Just not legal to get it there.
 
The Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund has taken the raw milk transport case and the goat farmers' case, which sound great, only the arguments they are making sound wrong even to non-lawyers.
 
The suit, filed July 22 in the Superior Court of Santa Clara County, asks for a declaration by the court that Gerbode, Skiwski and Sullivan have the inalienable right to purchase, own, possess and use a goat, that they have the inalienable right to consume the raw milk produced by their goat and a declaration that they have the inalienable right to contract with the Hulmes to board, care for and milk their goats.
 
Where does it say in the Constitution or in law that anyone has an inalienable right to own a goat?  To drink raw milk from their goat?  To board a board a goat?  Rather than go after the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) for what it is doing and challenging its authority to do so, or any basis on which it is doing so, or the bizarre legal distinctions it is making, why is FTCLDF putting anyone's rights in the hands of a court to decide if they exist?
 
By designing such an argument based on rights that are not spelled out in such a form anywhere, the FTCLDF opened the door to the FDA to assert in court as they are doing right now in the raw milk transport case, that
 
"There is no absolute right to consume or feed children any particular food."
"There is no 'deeply rooted' historical tradition of unfettered access to foods of all kinds."
"Plaintiffs' assertion of a 'fundamental right to their own bodily and physical health, which includes what foods they do and do not choose to consume for themselves and their families' is similarly unavailing because plaintiffs do not have a fundamental right to obtain any food they wish."
FDA's brief goes on to state that "even if such a right did exist, it would not render FDA's regulations unconstitutional because prohibiting the interstate sale and distribution of unpasteurized milk promotes bodily and physical health."
"There is no fundamental right to freedom of contract."
 
If the FTCLDF has no chance to win with its current arguments, what of the obscene precedents it would leave in its wake - the removal of the human rights around food, around contracting and around everyone's health.
 
But how could a judge possibly agree that the rights FTCLDF has put on the table exist in law?
 
Yet, there are other arguments to be made.  In the transport case, the FDA likely doesn't even have jurisdiction and could have been stopped right there.  Where is that argument?  Why is it not being made?  Or other arguments that deal more directly with what the FDA is doing and holds them accountable with specifics in law so a judge could rule favorably?
 
The public's concern about access to the food of its choice, to contracting freely and most certainly to its own health - the most basic of human rights - mean it has reason to watch closely the arguments being put forward.  Are they winning arguments or are they dangerously ill-conceived?  Is this a legal group with a history of success in protecting farmers or one that has lost many farming cases?  
 
Who are the lawyers at the FTCLDF and what is their own history of success in carrying forward what farmers have counted on them for?  
 
One lawyer there had some issues (http://www.feathersite.com/Poultry/SPPA/NAISOpenZanoni.html) in the past that conflicted with farmers' needs around the National Animal Identification System, and is now on the USDA's Advisory Committee on it.  Jim Hightower, former head of the Texas Department of Ag calls NAIS a "lunatic" (http://www.hightowerlowdown.org/node/1364) system and says it would be so onerous, it could destroy small farmers in the country.
 
[NAIS] far more onerous than the burden put on owners of guns and autos, the only two items of personal property presently subject to general systems of permanent registration. Gun owners, for example, can take their guns off their premises (to go hunting, attend a gun show, or just carry them around) without filing a report with the government. But NAIS would deny this freedom to chicken owners! The authorities are declaring hens to be more dangerous than a Belgian FN Five-SeveN handgun, and every time hen #8406390528 strays from her assigned GPS locale, NAIS autocrats would require her owner to report within 24 hours the location, duration, and purpose of her departure--or be subject to a stiff fine.  ....
 
To find out who's driving this, we have to ask the old Latin question, Cui bono?(Who benefits?) That takes us to another obscure acronym, NIAA, which stands for the National Institute of Animal Agriculture. Despite its official-sounding name, this is a private consortium largely made up of two groups: proponents of corporate agriculture and hawkers of surveillance technologies. They are the ones who conceived the program, wrote the USDA proposal, and are pushing hard to impose it on us.
 
Such industrialized meat producers as Cargill and Tyson have three reasons to love NAIS. First, the scheme fits their operations to a T, not only because they are already thoroughly computerized, but also because they engineered a neat corporate loophole: If an entity owns a vertically integrated, birth-to-death factory system with thousands of animals (as the Cargills and Tysons do), it does not have to tag and track each one but instead is given a single lot number to cover the whole flock or herd. Second, it's no accident that NAIS will be so burdensome and costly (fees, tags, computer equipment, time) to small farmers and ranchers. The giant operators are happy to see these pesky competitors saddled with another reason to go out of business, thus leaving even more of the market to the big guys.
 
Third, the Cargills and Tysons are eager to assure Japan, Europe, and other export customers that the U.S. meat industry is finally doing something to clean up the widespread contamination of its product. A national animal-tracking system would give the appearance of doing this without making the corporations incur the cost of a real cleanup. The health claims of NAIS are a sham ....
 
 
In order to protect our farmers, the basis of safe food in this country, there can't be complacency about the legal cases being filed against the FDA, anymore than there can be ignorance of the programs the big meatpackers are moving forward through a corrupt USDA.
 
While people have been looking forward to sustainable agriculture blossoming in this country, the "other side" has planned very thoroughly to get rid (http://www.opednews.com/articles/History-HACCP-
and-the-Foo-by-Nicole-Johnson-090906-229.html) of real farming in the US.  To stop those plans will require awareness, vigilance and an end of hopeful trust in any organization.  When the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC) betrayed its members - small farmers - by making no effort to stop the Food Modernization and Safety Act though it was clear that the FMSA would put control of all food and all farms under the power of a Monsanto VP (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeffrey-smith/youre-appointing-
who-plea_b_243810.html) at the FDA, then there is a problem with relying blindly on NGOs.
 
Scrutinizing lawsuits that mean the difference between one's children having access to real food and thus health at all; checking on organizations, their history and board members; knowing how things intersect and where the funding (http://www.opednews.com/articles/Food-Safety-Reform-
and-t-by-Nicole-Johnson-100426-437.html?show=votes) is coming from, are necessities.
 
There is no room for naivete when the companies involved are the same ones who took apart the economy, developed genetic engineering, (http://www.rense.com/general7/gw.htm) profit most by the absence
of food,
(http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/
johann-hari-how-goldman-gambled-on-starvation-2016088.html) and have well hidden plans (http://www.opednews.com/articles/FOOD-SAFETY-
REGULATIONS--by-Linn-Cohen-Cole-090108-947.html) to destroy farming.

 
 
 
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