A new federal program for livestock tracking will benefit big corporations, threaten small producers and do nothing to protect consumer health.

Government Food Safety System A Sham
By Jason Mark

Located south of the tiny town of Tarpley, Texas, Debbie Davis’s Seco Valley Ranch is something of a model farm. On her 1,800-acre spread, Davis grazes 225 longhorn cattle, every one of which she closely monitors so that she can better manage the herd and its health. Davis’ meat is prized in the supermarkets of Austin and San Antonio, where her grass-fed, pastured beef sells for a premium. In many ways, Davis is the very ideal of a local entrepreneur — profitable and secure, succeeding on her own terms.

Which is why it angers Davis so much when she considers the government’s plans to institute a “National Animal Identification System” that will give a 15-digit tracking number to every cow, chicken, pig, turkey, goat, sheep and horse in the United States to trace animals’ every move from birth until slaughter. The federal government and large meat producers are promoting the ID system — usually referred to by its acronym, “NAIS” — as a way to better control animal disease outbreaks. But the plan has small and organic ranchers in an uproar. They complain that the animal tracking system will place an undue burden on their operations, giving the biggest meat producers additional economic advantages in an already highly consolidated industry.

“It really does feel like Big Brother,” rancher Davis said in a recent interview. “The proposal is that I report every animal I have, every time an animal is born, every time an animal dies, and every time I move an animal from my property. … There’s a lot of expense for everyone. The ones who are going to get impacted are the little guys.”

If you’re a typical American consumer — for whom meat usually means supermarket “pink in plastic wrap,” not animals out on the range — then why should you care? Because, say critics of the government’s plan, the national livestock tracking system will do nothing to actually prevent animal sicknesses such as mad cow disease or avian flu. According to smaller farmers and sustainable agriculture advocates, the complicated and expensive government proposal is mostly a marketing gimmick. They say the program is simply a way for the largest food corporations to sell more products overseas without addressing some of the key weaknesses in the U.S. food system.

Since the first confirmed case of mad cow disease in 2003, U.S. beef producers have struggled to sell their products abroad. Pork producers fear that a similar market closure could one day hit them if there were an outbreak of, say, swine fever or hoof and mouth disease. The creation of an animal tracking ID system is largely intended, then, to give foreign importers some piece of mind by establishing a way to quickly trace back diseased animals to their source and quarantine that specific herd, while letting the rest of the industry go about business as usual. But the program conspicuously does nothing to address the root causes of livestock disease — improper diet and a confinement system that encourages epidemics. Instead, say small producers, the proposed plan will simply drop unnecessary costs onto those farmers who are already using best practices.

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The folks over at ESPN.com ran a story on Genarlow Wilson this week. Please read it  and  support the cause to free him from his unjust incarceration!!!!!

Outrageous Injustice
By Wright Thompson 

DOUGLASVILLE, Ga. — There is a cardboard box in Genarlow Wilson’s old bedroom.

It rests on the floor of his empty closet, near the deflated football and basketball. It’s filled with things he needed in his old life. Mostly, it’s overflowing with recruiting letters, from schools big and small. A “Good luck on the SAT” postcard from the coaches at Columbia. From another Ivy League college, Brown, a note from the football coach: “You have been recommended to me as one of the top scholar-athletes in your area.”

There’s a questionnaire from the Citadel. A brochure from Elon. An envelope from Sewanee. College after college, all wanting the undersized but overachieving Genarlow Wilson to consider their football programs. One open letter, dated three months before everything in this box became a reminder of a life derailed, invites him to take a campus visit. It begins:

Dear Genarlow,

Here you stand, on the threshold of four of the most influential, challenging, and rewarding years of your life.

Being Inmate No. 1187055
Genarlow Wilson is standing on a threshold all right, at the end of the last hall of Burruss Correctional Training Center, an hour and a half south of Atlanta. He’s just a few feet from the mechanical door that closes with a goosebump-raising whurr and clang. Three and a half years after he received that letter, he’s wearing a blue jacket with big, white block letters. They read: STATE PRISONER.

He’s 20 now. Just two years into a 10-year sentence without possibility of parole, he peers through the thick glass and bars, trying to catch a glimpse of freedom. Outside, guard towers and rolls of coiled barbed wire remind him of who he is.

Once, he was the homecoming king at Douglas County High. Now he’s Georgia inmate No. 1187055, convicted of aggravated child molestation.

When he was a senior in high school, he received oral sex from a 10th grader. He was 17. She was 15. Everyone, including the girl and the prosecution, agreed she initiated the act. But because of an archaic Georgia law, it was a misdemeanor for teenagers less than three years apart to have sexual intercourse, but a felony for the same kids to have oral sex.

Afterward, the state legislature changed the law to include an oral sex clause, but that doesn’t help Wilson. In yet another baffling twist, the law was written to not apply to cases retroactively, though another legislative solution might be in the works. The case has drawn national condemnation, from the “Free Genarlow Wilson Now” editorial in The New York Times to a feature on Mark Cuban’s HDNet.

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Today’s photo of the day shows Serena Williams, as she stormed through the semi-finals to earn a spot in the Australian Open finals. Many people thought that the unseeded Williams had lost her passion for tennis because she had been involved with fashion and entertainment. If she beats Sharapova in the finals, no one will doubt that she’s back in full effect.

At Tuesday’s State of the Union Address, President Bush acknowledged Wesley Autrey, the construction worker who jumped onto a subway platform and threw himself on top of a man who had fallen onto the tracks. Peep how he responds when Bush gives him his shout out. Is he over the top?