Listen Up
Snippet from the US Senate today, “to our Canadian friends, listen up; get your act together; follow NAFTA…” – this on the subject of continuing a ban on Canadian cattle due to Mad Cow Disease.
Too funny.
Funny first because the US meat inspection system is abominable1[2]. The only reason more mad-cow is not found in the US is because of the poor quality of the system there, and because of the powerful ranching lobby—its most certainly not because there are fewer BSE infected cattle south of the 49th parallel.
There’s a reason I’m a vegetarian, well, actually many reasons. BSE is simply one of them.
Side note: One Canadian entrepreneur built a meat processing facility equipped with its own BSE testing lab on-premises – the first, and only of its kind in Canada – perhaps unique or certainly rare even across all the US. Problem? Canadian government will not allow the facility to operate, acting under pressure for ranching and meat processing lobby (this is a trans-border lobby on the processing side, dominated by US corporations in both countries including Cargill).
Crazy, no?
The Senator’s comments are funny second because the US has been held in contravention of NAFTA and other international trade agreements time and time again. Softwood Lumber happens to be a local example here people of this area are very familiar with – despite ruling after ruling declaring illegal the punitive tariffs imposed by the US on Canadian softwood lumber, the US still has not eliminated these illegal tariffs nor returned the billions of dollars collected illegally .
Its humorous to hear a US Senator chide any other nation for their trade record, let alone Canada which has won its case under international trade law far more often than not.
What you don’t know can hurt you. Between 1989 and 1992, the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture detected 21,439 pesticide-residue violations. The feds prosecuted only one of those cases. Also, of the 50 million pounds of antibiotics used in the U.S. every year, half is pumped into livestock.1
In the Milwaukee case, one of the nation’s largest, most modern meatpacking plants â Excel Corp.‘s Fort Morgan, Colo., facility â was cited 26 times over a 10-month period2