***AFF***---1AC---ADT 1ACPlanPlan: the United States Federal Government should substantially curtail domestic surveillance of agriculture by amending the Animal Disease Traceability Program. Small FarmsAdvantage one is small farms

ADT devastates small farmers and is built on a flawed export model McGeary, et al 12 (Judiath- Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance, Email to the office of management and budget detailing the objections to ADT- over 60 different organizations signed on in support, Sep. 14, Re: USDA-APHIS Animal Disease Traceability Final Rule RIN: 0579-AD24, http://www.r-calfusa.com/wp-content/uploads/animal_id/120913-ltr-to-OMB-on-costs.pdf)ADT has been criticized by thousands of individuals and organizations because of the undue burdens that it will impose on producers. The cost of tagging and the extensive recordkeeping requirements under the rule will impact farmers and ranchers, as well as related businesses such as sale barns and veterinarians, and will ripple through our rural economies. As detailed in our letter of July 24, the USDA has significantly underestimated the costs of its rule to both cattle producers and poultry producers. While the agency claims that the costs are under $100 million annually, independent studies indicate that the costs could be three to five times that high for cattle producers alone. Moreover, the USDA failed to even attempt to estimate the costs to small-scale poultry farmers, a failure that, by itself, is sufficient cause to reject the rule. Ultimately, the cost will be more than dollars and cents. If producers cannot afford to meet the new requirements, they will be unable to purchase new animals or market their animals out of state, which could lead to more of them going out of business. Farmers and ranchers nationwide are already struggling just to keep their cattle alive through the drought. Over 75 percent of the contiguous U.S. is experiencing drought conditions, and almost half the country is in severe or worse drought, including the major farming and ranching regions. The impact on livestock and poultry producers has been devastating. The forage and feed situation is the worst this country has seen since the 1930s Depression,1 as producers with parched pastures, rangelands, and crops face expensive hay, grain, and shipping costs. Increased feed costs have led to a reduction in profits per livestock animal by more than $100 just since June 1.2 One agricultural economist has estimated that 2013 feed prices could triple the 1990-2004 average.3 Rapidly depleting livestock water is forcing many producers to haul water, which is also expensive and time-consuming. Families who have been the agricultural backbone of this nation are now at the breaking point. Many have already sold a large part of their herds, and the slaughter of many breeding age cows will mean that it will take a decade of normal rainfall to rebuild the cattle population in America. Traceability programs, such as USDAs ADT rule, also impose costs on livestock-related businesses, such as sale barns and veterinarians. It was recently reported that sale barns in New Zealand have added a new surcharge for cattle sales due to the additional equipment, staffing and administrative costs required for their NAIT (national animal identification and tracing) program.4 It is likely that similar costs under ADT will be passed on to U.S. farmers and ranchers. Like the sale barns, those producers who are able to stay in business will have to find a way to pass on the costs, which will mean higher prices for consumers, who are already facing higher prices at the grocery store.5 In contrast to the clear costs of the program, the benefits remain vague. The USDAs Regulatory Impact Analysis focused almost entirely on the monetary benefits from exports, but this approach is fundamentally flawed for several reasons. First, the benefits are based on models of varying degrees of traceability,6 yet tagging is not synonymous with traceability: an animal with an ear tag attached prior to crossing state lines may become untraceable later through lost tags or poor recordkeeping by state agencies. Second, as has been shown repeatedly and acknowledged by USDA officials, market access often depends more on politics than on traceability or other measures. Finally, the financial benefits of exports accrue almost entirely to the companies who sell the exports. Since the costs of the program will rest almost entirely on livestock producers and related businesses, it is inappropriate to justify those costs on the basis of benefits to other entities.

ADT exacerbates the burdens of small farmers with no analysis or compensation McGeary, et al 12 (Judiath- Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance, Email to the office of management and budget detailing the objections to ADT- over 10 different organizations signed on in support, June 6, Re: USDA-APHIS Animal Disease Traceability Final Rule RIN: 0579-AD24, http://www.r-calfusa.com/wp-content/uploads/animal_id/120606-OMB-Letter-updated.pdfTagging cattle is an equipment and labor-intensive task. The reason many small producers dont tag at this time is because they have not spent thousands of dollars on equipment such as chutes. Moreover, the claim that it would cost 18 cents for the labor to tag was based on the assumption that it takes only one minute to tag one animal.12 That may be true in very large, industrial-scale operations when averaged out over thousands of animals, but it is often far from true on a smaller scale. Cattle do not always run quickly and quietly through chutes, then stand still to have their ears tagged. The agencys estimate also does not take into consideration the administrative oversight needed to assure accuracy of the procedure. Even for those producers who are large enough to afford the necessary equipment, the USDAs cost estimates ignored several significant factors. USDA estimated the total upper-end cost of complying with animal identification provisions in the proposed rule at only $4.68 per head.13 Yet USDA had been presented a study, explained below, that estimated that the real cost of tagging cattle ranged from $17.00 per head to $27.00 per head, excluding the cost of the tag itself.14 Kris Ringwall, Ph.D., Director, Dickinson Research Center Extension and Livestock Specialist, North Dakota State University (NDSU), conducted the study that involved the tagging of 14,432 calves during the three-year period 2004-2006. The study concluded that the cost working each calf, tag placement, and documentation was $7.00 per calf. In addition, Dr. Ringwalls threeyear project determined that the tagging of calves was costly to producers because of shrink, which he defined as weight loss while handling calves.15 Dr. Rinwall stated in his testimony: When weve measured shrink in the cattle we have worked during the project, we estimate up to $10 to $20 in lost income potential per calf, regardless of the management activity applied.16 Based on Dr. Ringwalls findings, the cost of tagging and documenting calves, and the cost of the income lost due to shrink, ranged from $17.00 per head to $27.00 per head in 2006 or 2007 dollars, excluding the cost of the tag. The cost in 2012 dollars would obviously be greater. Applying Dr. Ringwalls findings to the likely number of cattle that cross state lines each year, the cost of the proposed rule to U.S. cattle producers ranges from $850 million to $1.35 billion, using our estimate of 50 million head of cattle crossing state lines each year. Even if only the cattle moved to slaughter in 2010 were considered (32.25 million head), the cost to U.S. cattle producers would range from $582 million to $924 million.17 SUMMARY: By understating labor and capital costs, as well as the impact on the animals weight (and therefore value) associated with this regulation, the USDA significantly underestimated the economic burden on cattle owners due to the ADT rule. II. USDA improperly dismissed the costs to cattle-related businesses The ADTs costly requirements do not stop with the people who own cattle. Both sale barns and veterinarians will be subject to long-term record-keeping requirements under the proposed rule.18 The agency dismissed the cost to sale barns by stating that they are already required to keep records on the cattle sold.19 The agency ignored, however, that the current record-keeping requirements do not require separate documents for each animal or even group of animals, while the proposed rule would do so, vastly expanding the sheer quantity of paper or data that must be maintained by the sale barns. Even more disingenuously, the agency anticipated that veterinarians will charge producers for the costs of keeping such records and then failed to address what those costs are likely to be.20 Whether the sale barns and vets pass on the costs to the producers or absorb it themselves, someone must pay those costs. In addition, the agencys assumption about the costs for veterinary services failed to include the typical charges for having a vet come out to the farm (or, in the alternative, for hauling animals to the vet), which can range from $30 to over $100 for each visit. The USDA failed to address the costs imposed by the ADT rule on a broad segment of support services provided to livestock producers or to account for how these costs might be absorbed or passed on to farmers and ranchers, in addition to the direct costs imposed on cattle owners. III. USDA wholly failed to address the costs to poultry owners Under the proposed rule, poultry moving interstate must be official identified either through group identification or with a permanent sealed and numbered leg band.21 There are no exceptions to the ID requirement, and they apply to both the person who sends and the person who received the animals.22 Group identification is defined so that it only applies when a unit of animals is managed together as one group throughout the preharvest chain.23 This definition describes the management practices at large, vertically-integrated facilities, but does not apply to the majority of small-scale poultry owners who frequently commingle poultry of different ages and from different sources. With respect to poultry, the agency conducted no analysis of the costs in its Regulatory Impact Analysis. The agency acknowledged in a sentence or two that there will be an impact on live bird markets, but also admitted that it does not know what those costs will be.24 The agency did not even acknowledge that there will be costs imposed on individuals and farmers who operate on a small scale, such as those who order day-old chicks from out-of-state or those who take birds to slaughterhouses across state lines. Instead, the agency made the false assumption that incremental costs for most poultry enterprises are expected to be minimal.25 Yet the vast majority of people who own poultry are not part of a vertically integrated operation and will have to use individual identification for their poultry, creating very significant costs in both time and out-of-pocket expenses. To understand the impact the rule would have on poultry owners, its important to first understand the complexity of the poultry industry. From commercial pastured broilers and pastured laying hens to backyard flocks to pets, hundreds of thousands of people own millions of birds under diverse conditions. For example, in USDAs 2007 survey of agriculture, the agency identified over 140,000 farms with between 1 and 399 layer hens.26 The survey did not include the many people in both rural and urban settings who own a few birds for food, show, or as pets, although urban and backyard poultry production is growing at an exponential rate. There are myriad variations in how people buy poultry outside of vertically-integrated operations. Many people order day-old chicks from hatcheries, commonly out-of-state. Some buy chicks from local feed and supply stores, who in turn usually have ordered the day-old chicks from hatcheries. Some buy juvenile or grown birds directly from farms. And many homeowners or smaller operations purchase "spent" laying hens for their personal use from commercial-scale operations, after they have become uneconomic to commercial egg producers. There are also many variations in how people manage their poultry. Pastured broiler operations often raise birds in discrete all-in-all-out units that might be amenable to group identification. In contrast, pastured layer operations will often commingle multiple batches of birds from different locations over a period of many years, culling individuals in the flock only as needed. Many people have to cross state lines to process their birds because so few slaughterhouses accept poultry from independent producers. The backyard owners and live bird markets have, if anything, even more complicated systems. The costs of raising poultry on a small-scale, from one bird to a few hundred, are very high, and there are no economies of scale. From buying feed in small quantities to the natural supplements to maintain health and necessary to certified organic production (such as diatomaceous earth, kelp, oyster and clam shell, and anti-parasitic herbs), small-scale poultry owners face costs that equal or even exceed their ability to recover those costs through sales. While pastured poultry products may sell at a seemingly high price, the profit margin is extremely slim, perhaps $1 on an entire bird or 25 cents on a dozen eggs. Very few of these individuals have employees to care for the birds, and almost none have employees to handle administrative functions. Thus the paperwork involved in tracking groups, even dynamic groups as is done in the vertically integrated hog operations, would impose significant costs in time and effort. The farmers would have to develop database or paperwork systems capable of tracking the merging and divided groups, and then enter and maintain all of the information. Its far from clear how the tagging could even be accomplished. Permanently tagging baby chicks or young chickens is simply impossible because of the growth of their legs. That growth would require holders of poultry to change leg bands a number of times as they grew, and documenting each change in identification. Even for adults, the cost of the tags and CVIs could easily be more than the value of the entire animal. At a meeting of the USDA Secretarys Advisory Committee on Animal Health, a USDA official stated that the agency had conducted several studies on the issue of tagging poultry in the context of the live bird market system. Dr. Hegngis testimony indicates that there simply is no costeffective, reliable way to individually tag poultry on this scale.27 Yet the USDA ignored the work conducted by its own staff in proposing the new requirements for poultry under the ADT rule. SUMMARY: The USDA completely failed to examine the economic impacts to the poultry industry, especially on smaller scale operations. If the rule is implemented as proposed, it will place disproportionate, onerous burdens on both small-scale farmers and those who seek to raise poultry for their personal use and enjoyment.

ADT is a zombie NAIS Lewis 12 (Patrice- Backwoods Home Magazine contributor, Issue 137 Sep/Oct 2012, Animal disease traceability, http://www.backwoodshome.com/articles2/lewis137.html)In 2009, small farmers and ranchers breathed a sigh of relief. So did people worried about another curtailment of individual liberty and those whose religious principles oppose microchipping. They thought they had driven a stake through the heart of the National Animal Identification System (NAIS), a USDA-run, state-implemented, program whose goal was to microchip and track all livestock, right down to the smallest chick on the smallest farm. But three years later NAIS has risen from the grave. Now the monster goes by a different name Animal Disease Traceability (ADT) and claims to be (cough) kinder and gentler. Don't be fooled. ADT is at least as insidious as NAIS. When I was asked to write this article, Backwoods Home's editors requested I keep the ranting to a minimum and provide just the facts. Those instructions were merited because frankly it's hard for a livestock owner to discuss the issue without frothing at the mouth. I have yet to hear from any small farmer, rancher, or homesteader who approved of NAIS or thought it was a good idea or even a feasible one. And we shouldn't be much fonder of ADT. I'm going to focus on the current threat, ADT; but a little background is in order, since the USDA's proposal for ADT owes so much to the supposedly "dead" NAIS. [image omitted] The background The NAIS was conceived by the National Institute for Animal Agriculture (NIAA), a group that consists primarily of digital chip manufacturers and big corporate meat producers. Piggybacking on the fear caused by the twin threats of terrorism and mad cow disease (BSE), the NIAA thought up a brilliant plan: "Hey Charlie, let's microchip every single livestock animal in America!" Under NAIS, every owner of even one livestock animal (cattle, horses, sheep, goats, poultry, pigs, bison, deer, elk, and even some species of fish raised for aquaculture) would have been required to register their name, address, telephone number, and the Global Positioning System coordinates of the animal's location with the federal government. Every individual animal in a small operation would have an implanted Radio Frequency Identification Device (RFID) bearing a 15-digit number. Large producers of pigs or poultry, on the other hand, were going to be allowed the advantage of grouping animals under one number. The livestock owner would be required to report activities associated with the chipped animals. Not only major events like birth or death; if your ram jumped your fence, you would have had to report it to the government. Ride your horse off your property? Each ride would have to be reported. No exceptions. There was more: heavy fines for non-compliance (up to $1,000 per day under proposed Texas regulations) and veterinarians would be required to report incidences of non-compliance if they find animals without ID numbers. The stated goal of NAIS was to safeguard America's meat supply against diseases by tracking every conceivable livestock animal. This detailed control on potential disease vectors would, in turn, soothe the fears of export markets In reality, of course, the implementation was a nightmare, both logistically and in terms of property rights and privacy. Additionally, it was clear from the start that the major beneficiaries were the large producers, and that small farmers and ranchers would be unfairly impacted. Thankfully, in June 2009, federal funding for NAIS in its original form was dropped from the fiscal 2010 spending bill by the House Agricultural Appropriations Subcommittee. House leaders indicated no future funds would be available unless the USDA one day made NAIS mandatory. Instead, the USDA abandoned NAIS. Some funding was kept to maintain the program in places where it was already being implemented, such as in Wisconsin, but the rest of the program was effectively dismantled. Some (myself included) navely assumed that the USDA had backed down from such an intrusive program because of the opposition. We were unaware that something new and just as insidious was up the USDA's sleeve. NAIS hurts small farmersincreases disease and bioterror risk Zanoni No date (Mary Zanoni-Ph.D. (Cornell), J.D. (Yale), Executive Director of Farm for Life. Why You Should Oppose the USDAs Mandatory Property and Animal Surveillance Program, https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CB4QFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.poultrypress.com%2Fhobby%2FWhy%2520You%2520Should%2520Oppose.doc&ei=LIFfVYjdEsS_sAWt54DwDg&usg=AFQjCNG0rZMUrC5qfIf-_nxZQRJuaJcy_w&sig2=y5t1FBJRBcNi-YqxvMD08g&bvm=bv.93990622,d.b2w )Poultry fanciers and keepers of small flocks are facing a grave threat from a proposed government intrusion into their innocent choice of pastimes and way of life. For several years, the USDA has been working with the largest-scale animal industry organizations (for example, the National Pork Producers, Monsanto Company, and Cargill Meat) to develop a mandatory National Animal Identification System (NAIS). However, most small scale livestock producers, people who raise animals for their own food, and people who keep horses or livestock as companion animals do not know about the USDAs plans. The NAIS will drive small producers out of the market, will make people abandon raising animals for their own food, will invade Americans personal privacy to a degree never before tolerated, will violate the religious freedom of Americans whose beliefs make it impossible for them to comply, and will erase the last vestiges of animal welfare from the production of animal foods. The Problem On April 25, 2005, the USDA released Draft Program Standards (St.) and a Draft Strategic Plan (Plan) concerning the NAIS. If you think the description below sounds too bizarre to be true, please go to usda.gov/nais, read the Standards and Plan, and check the citations. By January 1, 2008, the NAIS will be mandatory. (Plan, pp. 2, 10, 17.) Every person who owns even one horse, cow, pig, chicken, sheep, pigeon, or virtually any livestock animal, will be forced to register their home, including owners name, address, and telephone number, and keyed to Global Positioning System coordinates for satellite monitoring, in a giant federal database under a 7-digit premises ID number. (St., pp. 3-4, 10-12; Plan, p. 5.) Every animal will have to be assigned a 15-digit ID number, also to be kept in a giant federal database. The form of ID will most likely be a tag or microchip containing a Radio Frequency Identification Device, designed to be read from a distance. (Plan, p. 10; St., pp. 6, 12, 20, 27-28.) The plan may also include collecting the DNA of every animal and/or a retinal scan of every animal. (Plan, p.13.) The owner will be required to report: the birthdate of an animal, the application of every animals ID tag, every time an animal leaves or enters the property, every time an animal loses a tag, every time a tag is replaced, the slaughter or death of an animal, or if any animal is missing. Such events must be reported within 24 hours. (St., pp. 12-13, 17-21.) Third parties, such as veterinarians, will be required to report sightings of animals. (St., p. 25.) In other words, if you call a vet to your property to treat your horse, cow, or any other animal, and the vet finds any animal without the mandatory 15-digit computer-readable ID, the vet may be required to report you. If you do not comply, the USDA will exercise enforcement against you. (St., p. 7; Plan, p. 17.) The USDA has not yet specified the nature of enforcement, but presumably it will include imposing fines and/or seizing your animals. There are no exceptions -- under the USDA plan, you will be forced to register and report even if you raise animals only for your own food or keep horses for draft or for transportation. The Negative Effects Eradication of Small Farms People with just a few meat animals or 40-cow dairies are already living on the edge financially. The USDA plan will force many of them to give up farming. Loss of the True Security of Organic and Local Foods The NAIS is touted by the USDA and agricorporations as a way to make our food supply secure against diseases or terrorism. However, most people instinctively understand that real food security comes from raising food yourself or buying from a local farmer you actually know. The USDA plan will only kill off more local sources of production and further promote the giant industrial methods which cause many food safety and disease problems. Extreme Damage to Personal Privacy Legally, livestock animals are a form of personal property. It is unprecedented for the United States government to conduct large-scale computer-aided surveillance of its citizens simply because they own a common type of property. (The only exceptions are registration of motor vehicles and guns, due to their clear inherent dangers but they are registered at the state level, not by the federal government.) The NAIS would actually subject the owner of a chicken to far more surveillance than the owner of a gun. Surveillance of small-scale livestock owners is like the government subjecting people to surveillance for owning a couch, a TV, a lawnmower. What about non-livestock animals? Will the government next want to register all cats, dogs, and parakeets, and demand the global positioning coordinates of their owners houses and apartments? Insult to Animal Welfare The NAIS is the ultimate objectification of higher, sensitive living creatures, treating individual animals as if they were cans of peas with a bar code. Many people who raise their own animals or buy from small, local producers do so because they are very troubled by industrial-scale production of chickens, cattle, and pigs. These people will be forced either to sacrifice their personal privacy to government surveillance, or to stop raising their own food by humane standards. Burden on Religious Freedom Many adherents of plain (and other) faiths raise their own food animals and use animals in farming and transportation because their beliefs require them to live this way. Such people obviously cannot comply with the USDAs computerized, technology-dependent system. The NAIS will force these people to violate their religious beliefs.

Disease spread causes extinctionDavid Quammen 12, award-winning science writer, long-time columnist for Outside magazine for fifteen years, with work in National Geographic, Harper's, Rolling Stone, the New York Times Book Review and other periodicals, 9/29, Could the next big animal-to-human disease wipe us out?, The Guardian, pg. 29, LexisInfectious disease is all around us. It's one of the basic processes that ecologists study, along with predation and competition. Predators are big beasts that eat their prey from outside. Pathogens (disease-causing agents, such as viruses) are small beasts that eat their prey from within. Although infectious disease can seem grisly and dreadful, under ordinary conditions, it's every bit as natural as what lions do to wildebeests and zebras. But conditions aren't always ordinary. Just as predators have their accustomed prey, so do pathogens. And just as a lion might occasionally depart from its normal behaviour - to kill a cow instead of a wildebeest, or a human instead of a zebra - so a pathogen can shift to a new target. Aberrations occur. When a pathogen leaps from an animal into a person, and succeeds in establishing itself as an infectious presence, sometimes causing illness or death, the result is a zoonosis. It's a mildly technical term, zoonosis, unfamiliar to most people, but it helps clarify the biological complexities behind the ominous headlines about swine flu, bird flu, Sars, emerging diseases in general, and the threat of a global pandemic. It's a word of the future, destined for heavy use in the 21st century. Ebola and Marburg are zoonoses. So is bubonic plague. So was the so-called Spanish influenza of 1918-1919, which had its source in a wild aquatic bird and emerged to kill as many as 50 million people. All of the human influenzas are zoonoses. As are monkeypox, bovine tuberculosis, Lyme disease, West Nile fever, rabies and a strange new affliction called Nipah encephalitis, which has killed pigs and pig farmers in Malaysia. Each of these zoonoses reflects the action of a pathogen that can "spillover", crossing into people from other animals. Aids is a disease of zoonotic origin caused by a virus that, having reached humans through a few accidental events in western and central Africa, now passes human-to-human. This form of interspecies leap is not rare; about 60% of all human infectious diseases currently known either cross routinely or have recently crossed between other animals and us. Some of those - notably rabies - are familiar, widespread and still horrendously lethal, killing humans by the thousands despite centuries of efforts at coping with their effects. Others are new and inexplicably sporadic, claiming a few victims or a few hundred, and then disappearing for years. Zoonotic pathogens can hide. The least conspicuous strategy is to lurk within what's called a reservoir host: a living organism that carries the pathogen while suffering little or no illness. When a disease seems to disappear between outbreaks, it's often still lingering nearby, within some reservoir host. A rodent? A bird? A butterfly? A bat? To reside undetected is probably easiest wherever biological diversity is high and the ecosystem is relatively undisturbed. The converse is also true: ecological disturbance causes diseases to emerge. Shake a tree and things fall out. Michelle Barnes is an energetic, late 40s-ish woman, an avid rock climber and cyclist. Her auburn hair, she told me cheerily, came from a bottle. It approximates the original colour, but the original is gone. In 2008, her hair started falling out; the rest went grey "pretty much overnight". This was among the lesser effects of a mystery illness that had nearly killed her during January that year, just after she'd returned from Uganda. Her story paralleled the one Jaap Taal had told me about Astrid, with several key differences - the main one being that Michelle Barnes was still alive. Michelle and her husband, Rick Taylor, had wanted to see mountain gorillas, too. Their guide had taken them through Maramagambo Forest and into Python Cave. They, too, had to clamber across those slippery boulders. As a rock climber, Barnes said, she tends to be very conscious of where she places her hands. No, she didn't touch any guano. No, she was not bumped by a bat. By late afternoon they were back, watching the sunset. It was Christmas evening 2007. They arrived home on New Year's Day. On 4 January, Barnes woke up feeling as if someone had driven a needle into her skull. She was achy all over, feverish. "And then, as the day went on, I started developing a rash across my stomach." The rash spread. "Over the next 48 hours, I just went down really fast." By the time Barnes turned up at a hospital in suburban Denver, she was dehydrated; her white blood count was imperceptible; her kidneys and liver had begun shutting down. An infectious disease specialist, Dr Norman K Fujita, arranged for her to be tested for a range of infections that might be contracted in Africa. All came back negative, including the test for Marburg. Gradually her body regained strength and her organs began to recover. After 12 days, she left hospital, still weak and anaemic, still undiagnosed. In March she saw Fujita on a follow-up visit and he had her serum tested again for Marburg. Again, negative. Three more months passed, and Barnes, now grey-haired, lacking her old energy, suffering abdominal pain, unable to focus, got an email from a journalist she and Taylor had met on the Uganda trip, who had just seen a news article. In the Netherlands, a woman had died of Marburg after a Ugandan holiday during which she had visited a cave full of bats. Barnes spent the next 24 hours Googling every article on the case she could find. Early the following Monday morning, she was back at Dr Fujita's door. He agreed to test her a third time for Marburg. This time a lab technician crosschecked the third sample, and then the first sample. The new results went to Fujita, who called Barnes: "You're now an honorary infectious disease doctor. You've self-diagnosed, and the Marburg test came back positive." The Marburg virus had reappeared in Uganda in 2007. It was a small outbreak, affecting four miners, one of whom died, working at a site called Kitaka Cave. But Joosten's death, and Barnes's diagnosis, implied a change in the potential scope of the situation. That local Ugandans were dying of Marburg was a severe concern - sufficient to bring a response team of scientists in haste. But if tourists, too, were involved, tripping in and out of some python-infested Marburg repository, unprotected, and then boarding their return flights to other continents, the place was not just a peril for Ugandan miners and their families. It was also an international threat. The first team of scientists had collected about 800 bats from Kitaka Cave for dissecting and sampling, and marked and released more than 1,000, using beaded collars coded with a number. That team, including scientist Brian Amman, had found live Marburg virus in five bats. Entering Python Cave after Joosten's death, another team of scientists, again including Amman, came across one of the beaded collars they had placed on captured bats three months earlier and 30 miles away. "It confirmed my suspicions that these bats are moving," Amman said - and moving not only through the forest but from one roosting site to another. Travel of individual bats between far-flung roosts implied circumstances whereby Marburg virus might ultimately be transmitted all across Africa, from one bat encampment to another. It voided the comforting assumption that this virus is strictly localised. And it highlighted the complementary question: why don't outbreaks of Marburg virus disease happen more often? Marburg is only one instance to which that question applies. Why not more Ebola? Why not more Sars? In the case of Sars, the scenario could have been very much worse. Apart from the 2003 outbreak and the aftershock cases in early 2004, it hasn't recurred. . . so far. Eight thousand cases are relatively few for such an explosive infection; 774 people died, not 7 million. Several factors contributed to limiting the scope and impact of the outbreak, of which humanity's good luck was only one. Another was the speed and excellence of the laboratory diagnostics - finding the virus and identifying it. Still another was the brisk efficiency with which cases were isolated, contacts were traced and quarantine measures were instituted, first in southern China, then in Hong Kong, Singapore, Hanoi and Toronto. If the virus had arrived in a different sort of big city - more loosely governed, full of poor people, lacking first-rate medical institutions - it might have burned through a much larger segment of humanity. One further factor, possibly the most crucial, was inherent in the way Sars affects the human body: symptoms tend to appear in a person before, rather than after, that person becomes highly infectious. That allowed many Sars cases to be recognised, hospitalised and placed in isolation before they hit their peak of infectivity. With influenza and many other diseases, the order is reversed. That probably helped account for the scale of worldwide misery and death during the 1918-1919 influenza. And that infamous global pandemic occurred in the era before globalisation. Everything nowadays moves around the planet faster, including viruses. When the Next Big One comes, it will likely conform to the same perverse pattern as the 1918 influenza: high infectivity preceding notable symptoms. That will help it move through cities and airports like an angel of death. The Next Big One is a subject that disease scientists around the world often address. The most recent big one is Aids, of which the eventual total bigness cannot even be predicted - about 30 million deaths, 34 million living people infected, and with no end in sight. Fortunately, not every virus goes airborne from one host to another. If HIV-1 could, you and I might already be dead. If the rabies virus could, it would be the most horrific pathogen on the planet. The influenzas are well adapted for airborne transmission, which is why a new strain can circle the world within days. The Sars virus travels this route, too, or anyway by the respiratory droplets of sneezes and coughs - hanging in the air of a hotel corridor, moving through the cabin of an aeroplane - and that capacity, combined with its case fatality rate of almost 10%, is what made it so scary in 2003 to the people who understood it best. Human-to-human transmission is the crux. That capacity is what separates a bizarre, awful, localised, intermittent and mysterious disease (such as Ebola) from a global pandemic. Have you noticed the persistent, low-level buzz about avian influenza, the strain known as H5N1, among disease experts over the past 15 years? That's because avian flu worries them deeply, though it hasn't caused many human fatalities. Swine flu comes and goes periodically in the human population (as it came and went during 2009), sometimes causing a bad pandemic and sometimes (as in 2009) not so bad as expected; but avian flu resides in a different category of menacing possibility. It worries the flu scientists because they know that H5N1 influenza is extremely virulent in people, with a high lethality. As yet, there have been a relatively low number of cases, and it is poorly transmissible, so far, from human to human. It'll kill you if you catch it, very likely, but you're unlikely to catch it except by butchering an infected chicken. But if H5N1 mutates or reassembles itself in just the right way, if it adapts for human-to-human transmission, it could become the biggest and fastest killer disease since 1918. It got to Egypt in 2006 and has been especially problematic for that country. As of August 2011, there were 151 confirmed cases, of which 52 were fatal. That represents more than a quarter of all the world's known human cases of bird flu since H5N1 emerged in 1997. But here's a critical fact: those unfortunate Egyptian patients all seem to have acquired the virus directly from birds. This indicates that the virus hasn't yet found an efficient way to pass from one person to another. Two aspects of the situation are dangerous, according to biologist Robert Webster. The first is that Egypt, given its recent political upheavals, may be unable to staunch an outbreak of transmissible avian flu, if one occurs. His second concern is shared by influenza researchers and public health officials around the globe: with all that mutating, with all that contact between people and their infected birds, the virus could hit upon a genetic configuration making it highly transmissible among people. "As long as H5N1 is out there in the world," Webster told me, "there is the possibility of disaster. . . There is the theoretical possibility that it can acquire the ability to transmit human-to-human." He paused. "And then God help us." We're unique in the history of mammals. No other primate has ever weighed upon the planet to anything like the degree we do. In ecological terms, we are almost paradoxical: large-bodied and long-lived but grotesquely abundant. We are an outbreak. And here's the thing about outbreaks: they end. In some cases they end after many years, in others they end rather soon. In some cases they end gradually, in others they end with a crash. In certain cases, they end and recur and end again. Populations of tent caterpillars, for example, seem to rise steeply and fall sharply on a cycle of anywhere from five to 11 years. The crash endings are dramatic, and for a long while they seemed mysterious. What could account for such sudden and recurrent collapses? One possible factor is infectious disease, and viruses in particular.

Bioterrorism risks extinctionMhyrvold 13 Nathan Myhrvold founded Intellectual Ventures after retiring as chief strategist and chief technology officer of Microsoft Corporation. During his 14 years at Microsoft, Nathan founded Microsoft Research and numerous technology groups. He has always been an avid inventor. To date, he has been awarded hundreds of patents and has hundreds of patents pending. Before joining Microsoft, Nathan was a postdoctoral fellow in the department of applied mathematics and theoretical physics at Cambridge University, and he worked with Professor Stephen Hawking. He earned a doctorate in theoretical and mathematical physics and a master's degree in mathematical economics from Princeton University, and he also has a master's degree in geophysics and space physics and a bachelor's degree in mathematics from UCLA. (Strategic Terrorism: A Call to Action, July 2013, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2290382)Even more so than with nuclear weapons, the cost and technical difficulty of producing biological arms has dropped precipitously in recent decades with the boom in industrial molecular biology. A small team of people with the necessary technical training and some cheap equipment can create weapons far more terrible than any nuclear bomb. Indeed, even a single individual might do so. Taken together, these trends utterly undermine the lethality-versus-cost curve that existed throughout all of human history. Access to extremely lethal agentseven to those that may exterminate the human racewill be available to nearly anybody. Access to mass death has been democratized; it has spread from a small elite of superpower leaders to nearly anybody with modest resources. Even the leader of a ragtag, stateless group hiding in a caveor in a Pakistani suburbcan potentially have the button. Turning Life Against the Living The first and simplest kinds of biological weapons are those that are not contagious and thus do not lead to epidemics. These have been developed for use in military conflicts for most of the 20th century. Because the pathogens used are not contagious, they are considered controllable: that is, they have at least some of the command-and-control aspects of a conventional weapon. Typically, these pathogens have been weaponized, meaning bred or refined for deployment by using artillery shells, aerial bombs, or missiles much like conventional explosive warheads. They can be highly deadly. Anthrax is the most famous example. In several early- 20th-century outbreaks, it killed nearly 90% of those infected by inhaling bacterial spores into their lungs. Anthrax was used in the series of mail attacks in the United States in the fall of 2001. Even with advanced antibiotic treatment, 40% of those who contracted inhalational anthrax died during the 2001 attacks.1 That crime is believed to have been the work of a lone bioweapons scientist who sought to publicize the threat of a biological attack and boost funding for his work on anthrax vaccines. This conclusion is consistent with the fact that virtually no effort was made to disperse the bacterium indeed, the letters carrying the spores thoughtfully included text warning of anthrax exposure and recommending that the recipient seek immediate treatment. Despite this intentional effort to limit rather than spread the infection, a surprising amount of trouble was caused when the fine anthrax powder leaked from envelopes and contaminated other mail. Before this episode, nobody would have guessed that letters mailed in New Jersey to addresses in Manhattan and Washington, D.C., could kill someone in Connecticut, but they did. And no one would have predicted that a domestic bioterrorist launching multiple attacks, including one against the U.S. Congress, would elude the FBI for years. But that is what happened. What if such an attack were made not by some vigilante trying to alert the world to the dangers of bioweapons but instead by a real sociopath? Theodore J. Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber, may have been such a person. He was brilliant enough to earn a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Michigan yet was mentally disturbed enough to be a one-man terrorist cell: His mail bombs claimed victims over nearly two decades. Kaczynski certainly had enough brains to use sophisticated methods, but because he opposed advanced technology, he made untraceable low-tech bombs that killed only three people. A future Kaczynski with training in microbiology and genetics, and an eagerness to use the destructive power of that science, could be a threat to the entire human race. Indeed, the world has already experienced some true acts of biological terror. Aum Shinrikyo produced botulinum toxin and anthrax and reportedly released them in Tokyo on four separate occasions. A variety of technical and organizational difficulties frustrated these attacks, which did not cause any casualties and went unrecognized at the time for what they were, until the later Sarin attack clued in the authorities.2 Had the group been a bit more competent, things could have turned out far worse. One 2003 study found that an airborne release of one kilogram of an anthrax-spore-containing aerosol in a city the size of New York would result in 1.5 million infections and 123,000 to 660,000 fatalities, depending on the effectiveness of the public health response.3 A 1993 U.S. government analysis determined that 100 kilograms of weaponized anthrax, if sprayed from an airplane upwind of Washington, D.C., would kill between 130,000 and three million people.4 Because anthrax spores remain viable in the environment for more than 30 years,1 portions of a city blanketed by an anthrax cloud might have to be abandoned for years while extensive cleaning was done. Producing enough anthrax to kill 100,000 Americans is far easier to doand far harder to detectthan is constructing a nuclear bomb of comparable lethality. Anthrax, moreover, is rather benign as biological weapons go. The pathogen is reasonably well understood, having been studied in one form or another in biowarfare circles for more than 50 years. Natural strains of the bacterium are partially treatable with long courses of common antibiotics such as ciprofloxacin if the medication is taken sufficiently quickly, and vaccination soon after exposure seems to reduce mortality further.5 But bioengineered anthrax that is resistant to both antibiotics and vaccines is known to have been produced in both Soviet and American bioweapons laboratories. In 1997, a group of Russian scientists even openly published the recipe for one of these superlethal strains in a scientific journal.6 In addition, numerous other agents are similar to anthrax in that they are highly lethal but not contagious. The lack of contagion means that an attacker must administer the pathogen to the people he wishes to infect. In a military context, this quality is generally seen as a good thing because the resulting disease can be contained in a specific area. Thus, the weapon can be directed at a well-defined target, and with luck, little collateral damage will result. Unfortunately, many biological agents are communicable and so can spread beyond the people initially infected to affect the entire population. Infectious pathogens are inherently hard to control because there is usually no reliable way to stop an epidemic once it starts. This property makes such biological agents difficult to use as conventional weapons. A nation that starts an epidemic may see it spread to the wrong countryor even to its own people. Indeed, one cannot target a small, well-defined population with a contagious pathogen; by its nature, such a pathogen may infect the entire human race. Despite this rather severe drawback, both the Soviet Union and the United States, as well as Imperial Japan, investigated and produced contagious bioweapons. The logic was that their use in a military conflict would be limited to last-ditch, scorched earth campaigns, perhaps with a vaccine available only to one side. Smallpox is the most famous example. It is highly contagious and spreads through casual contact. Smallpox was eradicated in the wild in 1977, but it still exists in both U.S. and Russian laboratories, according to official statements.7 Unofficial holdings are harder to track, but a number of countries, including North Korea, are believed to possess covert smallpox cultures. Biological weapons were strictly regulated by international treaty in 1972. The United States and the Soviet Union agreed not to develop such weapons and to destroy existing stocks. The United States stopped its bioweapons work, but the Russians cheated and kept a huge program going into the 1990s, thereby producing thousands of tons of weaponized anthrax, smallpox, and far more exotic biological weapons based on genetically engineered viruses. No one can be certain how far either the germs or the knowledge has spread since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Experts estimate that a large-scale, coordinated smallpox attack on the United States might kill 55,000 to 110,000 people, assuming that sufficient vaccine is available to contain the epidemic and that the vaccine works.8, 9 The death toll may be far higher if the smallpox strain has been engineered to be vaccine-resistant or to have enhanced virulence. Moreover, a smallpox attack on the United States could easily broaden into a global pandemic, despite the U.S. stockpile of at least 300 million doses of vaccine. All it would take is for one infected person to leave the country and travel elsewhere. If New York City were attacked with smallpox, infections would most likely appear on every continent, except perhaps Antarctica, within two weeks. Once these beachheads were established, the epidemic would spread almost without check because the vaccine in world stockpiles and the infrastructure to distribute it would be insufficient. That is particularly true in the developing world, which is ill equipped to handle their current disease burden to say nothing of a return of smallpox. Even if only 50,000 people were killed in the United States, a million or more would probably die worldwide before the disease could be contained, and containment would probably require many years of effort. As horrible as this would be, such a pandemic is by no means the worst attack one can imagine, for several reasons. First, most of the classic bioweapons are based on 1960s and 1970s technology because the 1972 treaty halted bioweapons development efforts in the United States and most other Western countries. Second, the Russians, although solidly committed to biological weapons long after the treaty deadline, were never on the cutting edge of biological research. Third and most important, the science and technology of molecular biology have made enormous advances, utterly transforming the field in the last few decades. High school biology students routinely perform molecular-biology manipulations that would have been impossible even for the best superpower-funded program back in the heyday of biological-weapons research. The biowarfare methods of the 1960s and 1970s are now as antiquated as the lumbering mainframe computers of that era. Tomorrows terrorists will have vastly more deadly bugs to choose from. Consider this sobering development: in 2001, Australian researchers working on mousepox, a nonlethal virus that infects mice (as chickenpox does in humans), accidentally discovered that a simple genetic modification transformed the virus.10, 11 Instead of producing mild symptoms, the new virus killed 60% of even those mice already immune to the naturally occurring strains of mousepox. The new virus, moreover, was unaffected by any existing vaccine or antiviral drug. A team of researchers at Saint Louis University led by Mark Buller picked up on that work and, by late 2003, found a way to improve on it: Bullers variation on mousepox was 100% lethal, although his team of investigators also devised combination vaccine and antiviral therapies that were partially effective in protecting animals from the engineered strain.12, 13 Another saving grace is that the genetically altered virus is no longer contagious. Of course, it is quite possible that future tinkering with the virus will change that property, too. Strong reasons exist to believe that the genetic modifications Buller made to mousepox would work for other poxviruses and possibly for other classes of viruses as well. Might the same techniques allow chickenpox or another poxvirus that infects humans to be turned into a 100% lethal bioweapon, perhaps one that is resistant to any known antiviral therapy? Ive asked this question of experts many times, and no one has yet replied that such a manipulation couldnt be done. This case is just one example. Many more are pouring out of scientific journals and conferences every year. Just last year, the journal Nature published a controversial study done at the University of WisconsinMadison in which virologists enumerated the changes one would need to make to a highly lethal strain of bird flu to make it easily transmitted from one mammal to another.14 Biotechnology is advancing so rapidly that it is hard to keep track of all the new potential threats. Nor is it clear that anyone is even trying. In addition to lethality and drug resistance, many other parameters can be played with, given that the infectious power of an epidemic depends on many properties, including the length of the latency period during which a person is contagious but asymptomatic. Delaying the onset of serious symptoms allows each new case to spread to more people and thus makes the virus harder to stop. This dynamic is perhaps best illustrated by HIV, which is very difficult to transmit compared with smallpox and many other viruses. Intimate contact is needed, and even then, the infection rate is low. The balancing factor is that HIV can take years to progress to AIDS, which can then take many more years to kill the victim. What makes HIV so dangerous is that infected people have lots of opportunities to infect others. This property has allowed HIV to claim more than 30 million lives so far, and approximately 34 million people are now living with this virus and facing a highly uncertain future.15 A virus genetically engineered to infect its host quickly, to generate symptoms slowlysay, only after weeks or monthsand to spread easily through the air or by casual contact would be vastly more devastating than HIV . It could silently penetrate the population to unleash its deadly effects suddenly. This type of epidemic would be almost impossible to combat because most of the infections would occur before the epidemic became obvious. A technologically sophisticated terrorist group could develop such a virus and kill a large part of humanity with it. Indeed, terrorists may not have to develop it themselves: some scientist may do so first and publish the details. Given the rate at which biologists are making discoveries about viruses and the immune system, at some point in the near future, someone may create artificial pathogens that could drive the human race to extinction. Indeed, a detailed species-elimination plan of this nature was openly proposed in a scientific journal. The ostensible purpose of that particular research was to suggest a way to extirpate the malaria mosquito, but similar techniques could be directed toward humans.16 When Ive talked to molecular biologists about this method, they are quick to point out that it is slow and easily detectable and could be fought with biotech remedies. If you challenge them to come up with improvements to the suggested attack plan, however, they have plenty of ideas. Modern biotechnology will soon be capable, if it is not already, of bringing about the demise of the human race or at least of killing a sufficient number of people to end high-tech civilization and set humanity back 1,000 years or more. That terrorist groups could achieve this level of technological sophistication may seem far-fetched, but keep in mind that it takes only a handful of individuals to accomplish these tasks. Never has lethal power of this potency been accessible to so few, so easily. Even more dramatically than nuclear proliferation, modern biological science has frighteningly undermined the correlation between the lethality of a weapon and its cost, a fundamentally stabilizing mechanism throughout history. Access to extremely lethal agentslethal enough to exterminate Homo sapienswill be available to anybody with a solid background in biology, terrorists included. The 9/11 attacks involved at least four pilots, each of whom had sufficient education to enroll in flight schools and complete several years of training. Bin Laden had a degree in civil engineering. Mohammed Atta attended a German university, where he earned a masters degree in urban planningnot a field he likely chose for its relevance to terrorism. A future set of terrorists could just as easily be students of molecular biology who enter their studies innocently enough but later put their skills to homicidal use. Hundreds of universities in Europe and Asia have curricula sufficient to train people in the skills necessary to make a sophisticated biological weapon, and hundreds more in the United States accept students from all over the world. Thus it seems likely that sometime in the near future a small band of terrorists, or even a single misanthropic individual, will overcome our best defenses and do something truly terrible, such as fashion a bioweapon that could kill millions or even billions of people. Indeed, the creation of such weapons within the next 20 years seems to be a virtual certainty. The repercussions of their use are hard to estimate. One approach is to look at how the scale of destruction they may cause compares with that of other calamities that the human race has faced.

Turns are epistemologically flawed- they reflect a coercive mentality the only harms farmersSmith Thomas No Date (Heather Smith Thomas- author of 20 books and thousands of articles on animal health care, The NAIS ControversyPart I, http://www.dairygoatjournal.com/84-6/heather_smith_thomas/ )Government intrusion into our lives/Control of animal agriculture The greatest advantage America has over most other countries is our personal freedom and a free market system. Government involvement in free enterprise has always been detrimental, except when needed to ensure consumer and workplace safety and fair competition. But the NAIS (which seems to have been created to protect international markets and give unfair advantage to certain players in industry) is being forced on us in the guise of disease prevention. We were doing a good job of that already. The NAIS is not fair, nor necessary. It is un-American to impose a mandatory ID system on everyone who owns a farm animal. In essence this creates a tax on animal agriculture or requires us to "buy a license" to own an animal, since ultimately it would be illegal to not comply. Centralized control of agriculture is dictatorship, not free enterprise. The NAIS intrudes on our free enterprise system, our property rights and personal property, and in some instances our religious freedom. There are some religious groups who use animals for their own use and livelihood who do not believe in using modern technology like microchips or computers. And who will enforce the NAIS? Not everyone will comply, even if it becomes mandatory. Can the USDA make us do it? A growing number of people are taking an in-depth look at the NAIS plan, questioning not only whether it will work or be cost effective, but whether it is legal or constitutional (and whether the USDA even considered cheaper and more practical alternatives). The NAIS may violate the Fourth Amendment because USDA wants surveillance of every premises where even a single animal of any livestock species is kept, and wants RFID for every animal. There are millions of people who own a few chickens or goats, or raise a lamb or steer for themselves (or as a 4-H project) or have a horse. In these instances the premises the USDA wants to target with GPA surveillance are homes. NAIS would be intrusive to people who have done nothing more than own an animal, which is their right, under U.S. law. Forcing registration and having information about your private property (premises and animals) in a huge database is also a violation of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. Property rights are protected by our Constitution. No one can be deprived of property without due process of law. But the NAIS says USDA can remove untagged animals from a premises, with no mention of compensation for the owner. Government does not have the right, according to the Constitution, to come onto your property to inspect or tag your animal. Some states are starting to drag their feet on the NAIS plan, even a few of the states that were initially pushing ahead with premises registration. Representative Frank Nicely (Republican, Tennessee) introduced a bill that would let Tennessee opt out of the RFID cattle tracking system; he said the NAIS is not a good idea except for the people who are manufacturing radio tags. With the rising opposition to NAIS, the USDA may not be as confident now about making all states implement the program, even with funding bribes, and has decided to address the NAIS in the 2007 Farm Bill. The bureaucrats and big business interests who designed the NAIS are now lobbying Congress to get the program implemented. A groundswell of opposition is also bombarding Congress, and this has become a hot political issue in recent months. USDA Secretary Johanns claims that USDA has the authority to make the system mandatory, even without Congress passing legislation to that effect, so it will be interesting to see how this drama unfolds. Using Any Means to Gain the Goal In the push to convince animal owners to use the ISO frequency chips or ear tags, facts have been ignored or twisted to influence people that this is a better system (in spite of its documented flaws and shortcomings) than our American chip frequency system, and we are also told it is the accepted universal, international system, when it is not. Even scarier than these distortions, half-truths and "spins," however, are efforts to coerce us into thinking that the only way to protect ourselves from foreign disease or bio-terrorism is to embrace the NAIS system in its entirety (100 percent cooperation). On August 29, after an article appeared on the nonais.org website about the state of Vermont halting premises registration, a comment was left on the website from someone pretending to be a terrorist. The comment read: "Thanks, Vermont, for opening an avenue for those that wish to use animal disease as a bio-eco-terrorism tool. We would have tried to start along the SW border but thats now just too obvious. Thanks! Well take the NE corner and work our way in that way. ABET" When a comment is made, however, the website software records the IP address of the commenter. The owner of the nonaois.org site was able to track it down, with some help from OrgAbuse personnel. The comment came from the USDA Office of Operations, Office of the Chief Information Officer. This raises several questions. Is someone in the USDA threatening terrorism in order to justify the NAIS? Is some disgruntled USDA employee unhappy that many farmers are not accepting the NAIS, after all the hard work on it? Would some stoop so low as to actually pose as terrorists (or worse, commit an act of terrorism that might be blamed on another country) to scare Americans into thinking we really need the NAIS? This is no idle concern, considering that in todays world the control of food production has become political. As stated by Leo M. Schwartz (Chairman of the Virginia Land Rights Coalition) in his July 7, 2006 article "National Animal ID," the NAIS has nothing to do with national security, disease control or food safety. "It is land, livestock and people regulation, an industrial, inventory-tracking and control scheme, and a public- private partnership racket designed to license agriculture and bring the food supply system under the boot of centralized power. Regulatory burdens and costs, corporate monopolies, taxation and fees, liability, religious, property and privacy rights are serious concerns. But NAIS runs much deeper. Centralized control of agriculture is a mark of despotism," said Schwartz. He quoted Zimbabwes Marxist dictator, Robert Mugabe (who "nationalized" 95 percent of that countrys rural land and plunged Africas leading food producing nation into chaos) who said, "Absolute power is when a man [person] is starving and you are the only one able to give him [them] food." Food is power. Food is a weapon. Schwartz raised questions about the UKs outbreak of foot and mouth disease in 2001 in which some six million healthy sheep, cows, pigs and goats (including rare breeds) were slaughtered without justification, completely devastating British agriculture. Farmers were unable to defend their property, and the forced quarantine held them prisoner on their own land. British veterinarian Bob Michell later wrote, recalling the mass culling, "In the name of veterinary disease control we were about to embark on the greatest unnecessary slaughter of healthy animals in the history of our professionand the unnecessary suffering of those on whose farms they lived, or whose livelihoods evaporated in the smoking pyres." The cost of all this, according to Schwartz was more than 12 billion pounds, 60 farmer suicides "and a nation further conditioned to accept the security and safety of militarized police-state control."

ExportsAdvantage 2 is exports

Lack of traceability greatly hurts U.S. meat exports Schroeder and Tonsor 11(Ted C. Schroeder - Professor Agricultural Economics and Director Center for Risk Management Education and Research at Kansas State University, and Glynn T. Tonsor -Associate Professor Agricultural Economics at Kansas State University, Cattle Identification and Traceability: Implications for United States Beef Exports, http://www.agmanager.info/livestock/marketing/AnimalID/KSU_FactSheet_SchroederTonsor_9-12-11.pdf)Meat importing countries are adopting animal traceability systems similar to those of major exporters. Animal disease control and food safety assurances highlight the main goals of these systems. Consumers in European and Asian markets are increasingly requiring animal traceability, access to animal movement records, and producer identification as a means for developing trust in food safety assurances. Consequently, these countries will likely continue to add traceability requirements on their international suppliers. Access to these markets will increasingly depend upon demonstrated individual animal traceability. Furthermore, assuring animal age, either through traceability or dentition, is essential for access to many major importers especially for countries such as the United States and Canada who have OIE controlled BSE status. Information was collected regarding the status of market access requirements to illustrate the U.S. competitive position relative to major competing exporters and important importing countries. Table 2 summarizes trade requirements for selected major export and import countries. The United States, Canada, and Brazil share the same BSE status of controlled risk in OIE (World Animal Health Organization) classification whereas Australia, New Zealand, and Argentina enjoy negligible risk. Several important observations arise from the review of trade status summarized in table 2. The United States faces an array of trade restrictions related to animal age and export verification requirements to many key export market destinations. Most of these restrictions surfaced following the BSE discovery in the United States cattle herd in late 2003. In contrast, Australia and New Zealand face no restrictions on beef exports to important US export customers. Brazil and Argentina face some restrictions because of FMD, but also have no restrictions related to animal age verification. [Table omitted] [table omitted] Requirements for US beef exports to major importers are complicated by varying market access requirements. For example, maximum age requirements are common but vary, country-specific export verification programs are often required, different requirements and definitions exist across countries relative to specified risk material (SRM), some programs require tracing to farm of origin, and EU requires non-hormone treated cattle (NHTC) verification. The myriad of age and source verification requirements for U.S. beef export market access has been mostly met by the use of voluntary USDA age and source certification and related export verification programs. However, only about 10% of fed cattle slaughtered in the United States currently are being produced under a USDA age and source verified program. The varied market access requirements make sorting beef products a challenge that would be easier met with animal identification and traceability. Certainly, Australia and New Zealand have comparative advantages of having less cumbersome export market access requirements. Relative to the other major exporters in table 2, the U.S. animal identification system is the least developed. Therefore, export market access restrictions based on ID and traceability requirements will place the U.S. beef industry at a competitive disadvantage. Additionally, if the United States suffers an animal disease outbreak, the lack of traceability could again contribute to a long-term disruption in U.S. beef exports, at tremendous costs to the United States industry. Fear of disease could stop US exportsCME 15 (Chicago Mercantile Exchange & Chicago Board of Trade, CME: US Meat Exports Facing Significant Headwinds, http://www.thepoultrysite.com/poultrynews/34391/cme-us-meat-exports-facing-significant-headwinds/ ,18 February 2015)US - US meat exports are facing significant headwinds at this time, be this due to the sharp increase in the value of the US dollar, lower prices for competing meats in other countries and the slowdown strike in West Coast ports, write Steve Meyer and Len Steiner. And then there is always the risk of markets closing their doors due to disease outbreaks. Canada announced yesterday that it had found another case of BSE, which prompted South Korea to close its doors. But the impact from that will be minimal. South Korea does not purchase much beef from Canada and it is unlikely that the Canadian case will affect current US exports to the South Korean market. But the case does highlight that should we find a case of BSE in the US, it could in the short term cause some markets to close their doors. It is a risk. Then there is the spread of avian flu in the US West Coast. There have been cases of the highly pathogenic H5N8 avian influenza in Washington State and California. Some countries have imposed limited export bans but China is the only major importer to impose a complete ban on US poultry shipments. But it remains to be seen how other countries respond now that a second case of bird flu is found in a California, especially since this time it was found in a commercial operation. Most US poultry production is located in the South and Southeastern part of the US and there have been no indications of cases of bird flu there. Still, there is a risk that if the disease spreads in other states, we could see a more forceful reaction from our trading partners. Mexico in the past has blocked US poultry shipments due to bird flu concerns and Mexico today is a much more important market than it was 10 years ago. Back then (2005), Mexico accounted for about 10 per cent of US chicken exports. Last year, Mexico represented 21 per cent of all US chicken exports and, at 154 million pounds (CWE), it also represented about 2.7 per cent of all US chicken production. This is a very important market for US chicken and it bears watching how they respond to the new cases of avian flu cropping up. Poultry supplies are expanding globally and a strong US dollar also is working against our exports. Some countries may find this an opportune time to ban US shipments and use the outbreak of avian influenza as an excuse. And we need all the exports we can get considering the supply of chicken coming to market today and expectations for higher production in the spring and summer.

Argentina proves - lack of exports reduces meat productionQueck 13 (Paul Queck- freelance ag writer based in Indianapolis, Argentina Provides A Lesson In How to Ruin a Beef Industry , http://beefmagazine.com/beef-exports/argentina-provides-lesson-how-ruin-beef-industry, Sep 26, 2013)That was seven years ago. USDA reports that Argentina exported only 164,000 mt of beef in 2012, slipping to 11th place as a global beef exporter. Per-capita beef consumption has declined to 121 lbs./year. And during those same seven years, U.S. beef exports have increased from 472,668 mt to more than 1.13 million mt. Argentinas beef export decline is a welcome development to American cattlemen. After all, the less beef the Argentinians offer for the world market, the less competition for our U.S. beef exports. But Argentinas problems also serve as a warning for just how quickly bad government policies can cripple [undermine] an industry. In March 2006, Argentinas government in an effort to lower the rising price of beef to its people banned beef exports for 180 days. It followed that up by imposing a 15% export tax on fresh beef a tax thats still in force. The export tax choked off exports and domestic beef prices dropped. The government assumed ranchers and farmers would continue to raise cheap beef. But instead, they cut their herds and converted their pastures to soybean production which was more profitable than raising cattle for the artificially depressed beef market. Soybean acres increased in Argentina from 37.6 million acres in 2005 to more than 48 million acres in 2012 mostly gaining those new acres from pasture and other crops, such as corn. The national beef herd dropped from 54.26 million head in 2009 to 49.59 million head in 2012. In addition to raising fewer cattle, farmers and ranchers also freed up land for crops by finishing cattle in feedlots instead of producing the grass-fed beef for which the country had been famous.

U.S. meat exports displace local farmers-creating huge poverty -Mexico provesBacon 12 (David Bacon-Award-winning photojournalist, author, and immigrant rights activist ,How US Policies Fueled Mexico's Great Migration ,http://www.thenation.com/article/165438/how-us-policies-fueled-mexicos-great-migration , January 4, 2012 )Roberto Ortega tried to make a living slaughtering pigs in Veracruz, Mexico. In my town, Las Choapas, after I killed a pig, I would cut it up to sell the meat, he recalls. But in the late 1990s, after the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) opened up Mexican markets to massive pork imports from US companies like Smithfield Foods, Ortega and other small-scale butchers in Mexico were devastated by the drop in prices. Whatever I could do to make money, I did, Ortega explains. But I could never make enough for us to survive. In 1999 he came to the United States, where he again slaughtered pigs for a living. This time, though, he did it as a worker in the worlds largest pork slaughterhouse, in Tar Heel, North Carolina. His new employer? Smithfieldthe same company whose imports helped to drive small butchers like him out of business in Mexico. David Ceja, another immigrant from Veracruz who wound up in Tar Heel, recalls, Sometimes the price of a pig was enough to buy what we needed, but then it wasnt. Farm prices were always going down. We couldnt pay for electricity, so wed just use candles. Everyone was hurting almost all the time. Ceja remembers that his family had ten cows, as well as pigs and chickens, when he was growing up. Even then, he still had to work, and they sometimes went hungry. But we could give milk to people who came asking for it. There were people even worse off than us, he recalls. In 1999, when Ceja was 18, he left his familys farm in Martinez de la Torre, in northern Veracruz. His parents sold four cows and two hectares of land, and came up with enough money to get him to the border. There he found a coyote who took him across for $1,200. I didnt really want to leave, but I felt I had to, he remembers. I was afraid, but our need was so great. He arrived in Texas, still owing for the passage. I couldnt find work for three months. I was desperate, he says. He feared the consequences if he couldnt pay, and took whatever work he could find until he finally reached North Carolina. There friends helped him get a real job at Smithfields Tar Heel packinghouse. The boys I played with as a kid are all in the US, he says. Id see many of them working in the plant. North Carolina became the number-one US destination for Veracruzs displaced farmers. Many got jobs at Smithfield, and some, like Ortega and Ceja, helped lead the sixteen-year fight that finally brought in a union there. But they paid a high price. Asserting their rights also made them the targets of harsh immigration enforcement and a growing wave of hostility toward Mexicans in the American South. The experience of Veracruz migrants reveals a close connection between US investment and trade deals in Mexico and the displacement and migration of its people. For nearly two decades, Smithfield has used NAFTA and the forces it unleashed to become the worlds largest packer and processor of hogs and pork. But the conditions in Veracruz that helped Smithfield make high profits plunged thousands of rural residents into poverty. Tens of thousands left Mexico, many eventually helping Smithfields bottom line once again by working for low wages on its US meatpacking lines. The free trade agreement was the cause of our problems, Ceja says. Smithfield Goes to Mexicoand Migrants Come Here In 1993 Carroll Foods, a giant hog-raising corporation, partnered with a Mexican agribusiness enterprise to set up a huge pig farm known as Granjas Carroll de Mexico (GCM) in Veracruzs Perote Valley. Smithfield, which had a longtime partnership with Carroll Foods, bought the company out in 1999. [image omitted] By 2008 the Perote operation was sending close to a million pigs to slaughter every year85 percent to Mexico City and the rest to surrounding Mexican states. Because of its location in the mountains above the city of Veracruz, Mexicos largest port, the operation could easily receive imported corn for feed, which makes up two-thirds of the cost of raising hogs. NAFTA lifted the barriers on Smithfields ability to import feed. This gave it an enormous advantage over Mexican producers, as US corn, heavily subsidized by US farm bills, was much cheaper. After NAFTA, says Timothy Wise, of the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University, US corn was priced 19 percent below the cost of production. But Smithfield didnt just import feed into Mexico. NAFTA allowed it to import pork as well. According to Alejandro Ramrez, general director of the Confederation of Mexican Pork Producers, Mexico imported 30,000 tons of pork in 1995, the year after NAFTA took effect. By 2010 pork imports, almost all from the United States, had grown more than twenty-five times, to 811,000 tons. As a result, pork prices received by Mexican producers dropped 56 percent. US pork exports are dominated by the largest companies. Wise estimates that Smithfields share of this export market is significantly greater than its 27 percent share of US production. Imported pork had a dramatic effect on Mexican jobs. We lost 4,000 pig farms, Ramrez estimates, based on reports received by the confederation from its members. On Mexican farms, each 100 animals produce five jobs, so we lost 20,000 farm jobs directly from imports. Counting the five indirect jobs dependent on each direct job, we lost over 120,000 jobs in total. That produces migration to the US or to Mexican cities, Ramrez charges. Corn imports also rose, from 2 million to 10.3 million tons from 1992 to 2008. Small Mexican farmers got hit with a double whammy, Wise explains. On the one hand, competitors were importing pork. On the other, they were producing cheaper hogs. Smithfield was both producer and importer. Wise estimates that this one company supplies 25 percent of all the pork sold in Mexico. The increases in pork and corn imports were among many economic changes brought about by NAFTA and concurrent neoliberal reforms to the Mexican economy, such as ending land reform. Companies like Smithfield benefited from these changes, but poverty increased also, especially in the countryside. In a 2005 study for the Mexican government, the World Bank found that the extreme rural poverty rate of 35 percent in 199294, before NAFTA, jumped to 55 percent in 199698, after NAFTA took effectthe years when Ortega and Ceja left Mexico. This could be explained, the report said, mainly by the 1995 economic crisis, the sluggish performance of agriculture, stagnant rural wages, and falling real agricultural prices. By 2010, according to the Monterrey Institute of Technology, 53 million Mexicans were living in povertyhalf the countrys population. About 20 percent live in extreme poverty, almost all in rural areas. The growth of poverty, in turn, fueled migration. In 1990, 4.5 million Mexican-born people lived in the United States. A decade later, that population had more than doubled to 9.75 million, and in 2008 it peaked at 12.67 million. About 5.7 million were able to get some kind of visa; another 7 million couldnt but came nevertheless. As an agricultural state, Veracruz suffered from Mexicos abandonment of two important policies, which also helped fuel migration. First, neoliberal reforms did away with Tabamex, a national marketing program for small tobacco farmers. A similar program for coffee growers ended just as world coffee prices plunged to record lows. Second, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, the countrys corrupt president, pushed through changes to Article 27 of the Constitution in 1992, dismantling land reform and allowing the sale of ejidos, or common lands, as private property. Waves of tobacco and coffee farmers sold their land because they could no longer make a living on it. Many became migrants. But allowing the sale of ejidos to foreigners made it possible for Carroll Foods to buy land for its swine sheds. Displaced farmers then went to work in those sheds at low wages. Simultaneous changes in the United States also accelerated migration. The Immigration Reform and Control Act, passed by Congress in 1986, expanded the existing H2-A visa program, creating the current H2-A program, which allows US agricultural employers to bring in workers from Mexico and other countries, giving them temporary visas tied to employment contracts. Growers in North Carolina became large users of the program, especially through the North Carolina Growers Association. Landless tobacco farmers from Veracruz became migrant tobacco workers in the Carolinas. Many Veracruzanos came because we were offered work in the tobacco fields, where we had experience, remembers Miguel Huerta. Then people whod been contracted just stayed, because they didnt have anything in Mexico to go back to. After the tobacco harvest, workers spread out to other industries. From Huertas perspective, these companies are very powerful. They can go to Mexico and bring as many employees as they want and replace them when they want. Poverty, though, was the real recruiter. It created, as Ceja says, the need. We all had to leave Veracruz because of it, he emphasizes. Otherwise, we wouldnt do something so hard.U.S. meat exports displacement of local farmers has devastating environmental consequencesBacon 12 (David Bacon-Award-winning photojournalist, author, and immigrant rights activist ,How US Policies Fueled Mexico's Great Migration ,http://www.thenation.com/article/165438/how-us-policies-fueled-mexicos-great-migration , January 4, 2012 )Hog raising is a dirty businessand the environmental damage it creates has provoked rising opposition to Smithfields operations within US borders. In Virginia in 1997, federal judge Rebecca Smith imposed the largest federal pollution fine to that date$12.6 millionon the company for dumping pig excrement into the Pagan River, which runs into Chesapeake Bay. That year the state of North Carolina went further, passing a moratorium on the creation of any new open-air hog waste lagoons and a cap on production at its Tar Heel plant. In 2000 thenState Attorney General Mike Easley forced Smithfield to fund research by North Carolina State University to develop treatment methods for hog waste that are more effective than open lagoons. Despite North Carolinas well-known hostility to regulating business, in 2007 Easley (by then governor) made the moratorium permanent. In the face of public outcry over stench and flies, even the anti-regulation industry association, the North Carolina Pork Council, supported it. [image omitted] In Mexicos Perote Valley, howevera high, arid, volcano-rimmed basin straddling the states of Veracruz and PueblaSmithfield could operate unburdened by the environmental restrictions that increasingly hampered its expansion in the United States. Mexico has environmental standards, and NAFTA supposedly has a procedure for requiring their enforcement, but no complaint was ever filed against GCM or Smithfield under NAFTAs environmental side agreement. Carolina Ramirez, who heads the womens department of the Veracruz Human Rights Commission, concluded bitterly that the company can do here what it cant do at home. For local farmers like Fausto Limon, the hog operation was devastating. On some warm nights his children would wake up and vomit from the smell. Hed put his wife, two sons and daughter into his beat-up pickup, and theyd drive away from his farm until they could breathe without getting sick. Then hed park, and theyd sleep in the truck for the rest of the night. Limon and his family all had painful kidney ailments for three years. He says they kept taking medicine until finally a doctor told them to stop drinking water from the farms well. Last May they began hauling in bottled water. Once they stopped drinking from the well, the infections stopped. Less than half a mile from his house is one of the many pig farms built by Smithfields Mexican hog-raising subsidiary, GCM. Before the pig farms came, they said they would bring jobs, Limon remembers. But then we found out the reality. Yes, there were jobs, but they also brought a lot of contamination. David Torres, a Perote native who spent eight years in the operations maternity section, estimates that GCM has eighty complexes, each with as many as 20,000 hogs. The sheds look clean and modern. When I went to work there, I could see the company was completely mechanized, he says. The Mexican News online business journal explains that production cost is very low because of the high ratio of pigs to workers. The preparation of food and feeding of the pigs is completely automated, along with temperature control and the elimination of excrement. Workers arent employed directly by Granjas Carroll, however, according to Torres. Since we work for a contractor, were not entitled to profit-sharing or company benefits, he says. Granjas Carroll made millions of dollars in profits, but never distributed a part of them to the workers, as required under Mexicos federal labor law. Torres was paid 1,250 pesos ($90) every fifteen days; he says the company picked him up at 6 every morning and returned him home at 5:30 each evening, often six days a week. In back of each complex is a large oxidation pond for the hogs urine and excrement. A recent drive through the valley revealed that only one of several dozen was covered. Granjas Carroll doesnt use concrete or membranes under their ponds, Torres charges, so the water table is getting contaminated. People here get their water from wells, which are surrounded by pig farms and oxidation ponds. Ruben Lopez, a land commissioner in Chichicuautla, a valley town surrounded by hog farms, also says there is no membrane beneath the pools. In response to an article published in August in Imagen de Veracruz, a Veracruz newspaper, GCM public relations director Tito Tablada Corts declared, Granjas Carroll does not pollute. And Smithfield spokeswoman Amy Richards says, Our environmental treatment systems in Mexico strictly comply with local and federal regulations. Mexico encourages, and requires, anaerobic digesters and evaporation ponds. Yet despite the 1,200 jobs the pig farms created in a valley where employment is scarce, Limon estimates that a third of the young people have left. They dont see a future, and every year its harder to live here, he says. In 2004 a coalition of local farmers called Pueblos Unidos (United Towns) started collecting signatures for a petition to protest the expansion of the swine sheds. According to teacher Veronica Hernandez, students told her that going to school on the bus was like riding in a toilet. Some of them fainted or got headaches, she charges. When expansion plans moved forward nonetheless, on April 26, 2005, hundreds of people blocked the main highway. That November a construction crew about to build another shed and oxidation pond was met by 1,000 angry farmers. Police had to rescue the crew. Finally, in 2007 GCMs Tablada Corts signed an agreement with local towns blocking any new expansion. That year, however, the company filed criminal complaints against Hernandez and thirteen other leaders, charging them with defaming the company. Although the charges were eventually dropped, the farmers were intimidated and the protest movement diminished. [image omitted] Then, in early 2009, the first confirmed case of swine flu, the AH1N1 virus, was found in a 5-year-old boy, dgar Hernndez from La Gloria. Pickup tr