More lobbying of Biden administration policy by the enviro-progressives on food, farm and animal rights, along with speculation on Secretary of Ag nominees.
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...Jonathan Lovvorn, a colleague of Morris’s and faculty co-director of Yale’s Law, Ethics, & Animal Program, tells me he’d like to see Biden “issue an [executive order] directing USDA, EPA, and other agencies to catalog all the regulatory and enforcement exemptions currently bestowed on factory farms, and to develop a regulatory action plan to restore environmental, labor, animal welfare, and climate accountability to this industry.”
Specifically, Lovvorn also highlights the need to incorporate animal agriculture, which accounts for a huge chunk of greenhouse gas emissions, into Biden’s climate policies, including by listing emissions from CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations, the technical acronym for factory farms) as pollutants covered by the Clean Air Act. He’d also like to see a Biden executive order halting explicit government support for the construction or expansion of any new CAFOs.
Leah Garcés, president of the animal protection group Mercy for Animals, echoed the need for the EPA to use the Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act to regulate CAFOs. On climate in particular, “EPA previously studied CAFO emissions, but it was highly flawed and even excluded beef cattle and turkeys from the study,” she says.
She and Mercy for Animals call on the Biden Administration to “update Clean Water Act regulations to reduce the minimum size requirement for CAFOs to be regulated under the CWA. Under the existing definition …only about 10% of all current CAFOs are large enough to qualify as a regulated source point under the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permitting program.” Reducing the minimum size requirement would effectively put more factory farms under the regulation of the EPA.
Garcés also wants the EPA to “take action against states for failing to enforce the CWA against CAFOs. For example, in 2012, the EPA found that Iowa was not conducting inspections to determine whether CAFOs needed permits, assessing adequate penalties against CAFOs, or issuing NPDES permits when appropriate.”
A more specific animal welfare move both Lovvorn and Garcés endorsed is directing the USDA to interpret the Humane Slaughter Act, a 1958 law that while poorly enforced nonetheless provides valuable protections to cattle and pigs, so it applies to poultry for the first time.
Lovvorn also has a set of Covid-19-specific policy recommendations. “The Biden administration should issue an emergency rule setting a mandatory OSHA [Occupational Safety and Health Administration] standard to ensure proper social distancing, PPE, and other protections for slaughterhouse workers — something the Trump administration flatly refused to do,” Lovvorn says. Garcés also highlighted the need for the Biden administration to ban cruel “depopulation” measures that farms shutting down, including ones shutting down due to shocks to the meat-packing industry during Covid, use to kill their animals.
Yale’s Morris argues for breaking up the monopolistic meat industry using antitrust levers as a priority, and points to a proposal from antitrust groups to do just that.
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And here is their preference for Secretary of Agriculture:
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...Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-OH), one of the most active advocates for food stamps in Congress, is reportedly one of the candidates Biden is considering for secretary.
...“We do not need another pro-agribusiness USDA secretary,” Morris says. “[Rep. Chellie] Pingree or Fudge, two of the other candidates being mentioned in the press, would be better choices for people and animals.”
Pingree (D-ME), a veteran of the House Appropriations subcommittee for agriculture and the Ag Committee, is actually an organic farmer herself, with a 200-acre vegetable, pig, and chicken farm on North Haven Island off the coast of Maine.
Either she or Fudge would seem to be sound choices if the Biden administration actually wants to confront factory farming and animal agriculture head-on.
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Please note they make no pretensions about the CWA or the CAA being about clean water or clean air. Instead they are to be used as a bludgeon to impose their policy preferences. Exactly the way the enviros use the ESA, NEPA, etc. on federal lands.
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