R-Calf Offensive

[pandiana]

I thought it would be of interest to see the rationale that R-Calf is using in their arguments. The following is a an abstract, with more available on their website.

Cattle-Producer Group Files Motion
for Summary Judgment in Canadian Border Case

May 18, 2005
(Billings, Mont.) – Since 1989, the United States has had regulations prohibiting the importation of cattle or beef products from any country affected by bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE). Canada is the 23rd country to have discovered the incurable disease within its native herd.



To this day, the United States has not accepted cattle or beef from any of the first 22 countries affected by this disease, whether these nations reported only one case (Israel, Finland, Greece, and Austria), or hundreds of cases (France and Germany). Just a couple of years ago, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) was telling Congress and the international community that these import bans were a key element to prevent the introduction of BSE into the United States. Only when Canada was impacted by BSE did the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) attempt to overturn the 1989 policy, established to protect our domestic cattle herd and beef consumers within the United States.



Last week, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Montana, R-CALF USA filed a motion for summary judgment in its lawsuit against the USDA, in which R-CALF USA asked the court to overturn USDA’s Final Rule on reopening the Canadian border to live cattle and additional beef products.



R-CALF USA’s motion asserts that USDA has failed to exercise sufficient caution in protecting domestic animal health and human health, as directed by Congress, when the agency relaxed prior requirements to deal with BSE and abandoned conservative positions without adequate justification when considering importing from a country known to have BSE. When USDA attempted to explain away the risks, USDA made assumptions that were inconsistent with the scientific data the agency had before it and the scientific data the agency already had on file.



R-CALF USA argued that USDA had a special obligation in this case to publicly explain why the agency chose to abandon its prior decision to ban imports from BSE-affected countries, and USDA did not successfully meet that obligation. Even the agency’s own Inspector General criticized USDA for expanding imports from Canada based only on a desire to respond to industry (meat processor) requests to expand trade, rather than on scientific determinations that the products presented a minimal risk.



R-CALF USA’s motion for summary judgment also points out that USDA failed to explain why it had considered certain products to be low-risk, especially when USDA’s own Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathy (TSE) Working Group had concluded that some of these products were moderate-risk, or even high-risk.



The TSE Working Group also told USDA that, even for low-risk products, “significant trade should be prohibited because of BSE, and shouldn’t be resumed ‘unless and until’ seven criteria are met.” (See www.r-calfusa.com “BSE-Litigation” to view entire TSE Working Group Memo dated June 16, 2003.)



USDA moved forward to reopen trade in a broad range of beef commodities just two months after the TSE Working Group presented its scientific findings to the agency – an action directly contrary to the conclusions of USDA’s BSE risk-mitigation experts on the TSE Working Group’s 14-member panel.



R-CALF USA further stated in its motion for summary judgment that USDA acted improperly when the agency assumed the prevalence of BSE in the Canadian herd is ‘very low,’ without any apparent support for that statement, and the agency did not demonstrate justification for those assumptions.



Canada has not yet conducted the kind of testing necessary to determine the prevalence of BSE in its herd, nor in potential “hot spots” in Canada. USDA attempted to explain away the discovery of four cases of BSE in Canadian-origin cattle in just a year-and-a-half by attributing those results to a “hot spot” of BSE in Alberta, and yet, failed to assess the risks to U.S. cattle and U.S. consumers if such a hot spot does, in fact, exist.



R-CALF USA also requested in its motion for summary judgment that the court halt all imports of Canadian boxed beef, as USDA has continually failed to adhere to standard “notice-and-comment rulemaking” procedures regarding these products, as well as the failure of the agency to make case-by-case determinations on the safety of each product. Again, USDA’s own experts urged strengthening U.S. and Canadian risk-mitigation measures before resuming imports from Canada, but most of those critical upgrades in disease protection measures to reflect the obvious presence of BSE in Canada still have not been implemented.



“R-CALF filed a motion for summary judgment partly as a matter of standard legal procedure, and partly to prevent a long, drawn-out court battle when it’s obvious to anyone who has reviewed the record that USDA does not have a reasoned or scientific justification for allowing cattle and beef from a BSE-affected nation into the United States, particularly under the extremely lenient conditions proposed in the agency’s Final Rule,” said R-CALF USA President and Co-Founder Leo McDonnell.

[pandiana]

The following is a response to the above from FFA.

Stacking Falsities on Top of Each Other

More False Statements and Incorrect Implications from R-CALF's Position Paper on Canada's Surveillance
Colorado Springs, CO May 21, 2005 We've covered R-CALF's misrepresentation in its position paper* on Canada's surveillance program that it doesn't meet international standards - it not only does meet them, it exceeds them by a huge margin. We've also shown that testing patterns in other countries show no significant correlation between percentage of cattle population tested and BSE cases found. .

What other claims in R-CALF's position paper should you be aware of? The paper states that Canada has not tested enough cattle, "to confidently detect a rate of one case of BSE per million cattle." The World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) - the internationally recognized authority - disagrees.

R-CALF then attempts to build on a false assumption that Canada doesn't test enough, saying that, because it doesn't test enough and has found four BSE cases, that must mean Canada's infection rate must be much higher than other people think - higher than one per million.

Of course, neither claim is true. In fact, Canada, using R-CALF's own charts, has one of the lowest raw numbers of cases, from a total cow population that greatly exceeds all the other countries on R- CALF's comparison list (2003 data). Canada's mature cow population, at 5.5 million for that year, is 70 percent larger than Poland (with 26 cases), more than 2.5 times Japan (16 cases then, 18 now), 3.8 times Belgium (26 cases) and 19 times Slovakia (9 cases). Canada has shown that it has fewer cases from a much larger population, while testing far more numbers than the OIE says is necessary.

R-CALF also claims in its report that the OIE recommends, "countries with Canada's risk profile not only increase testing, but also, that such countries begin testing the subpopulation of cattle that enters the human food chain." This is patently false.

The OIE recommends that testing occur first from subpopulations of animals displaying clinical signs and then those we would refer to as "downers."

"Any shortfall in the first two subpopulations (recommended minimum of 336 animals annually for Canada), should be addressed by the sampling of normal cattle over 30 months of age at slaughter," the OIE document specifies. Thus R-CALF's claim that the OIE recommends Canada should be testing large numbers of normal slaughter cattle is not true. Canada tests vastly more cattle in the high-risk categories than the minimum the OIE recommends. In fact, the OIE makes it very clear that testing should occur on the two high-risk classifications of animals first, and that exclusive dependence on testing of normal slaughter cattle is not recommended.

R-CALF has also used the technique of piling false conclusions on false assumptions regarding Canada's classification as a "minimal risk" country. They claim that Canada would not meet OIE criteria for minimal risk countries. OIE recommendations say that, in addition to other factors such as an appropriate risk- management program and a surveillance-testing program as Canada has implemented, to meet minimal risk classification a country should have found fewer than two cases per million head of adult population in each of the last four 12-month periods. That would mean that Canada, with a total cowherd population now exceeding six million, would have to have discovered fewer than 12 cases in each of the last four 12-month periods to qualify for minimal risk. Having two total cases in 2003, one in 2004 and one in 2005, it is obvious that Canada is nowhere near the limits for minimal risk classification, despite R- CALF's claims they have exceeded them.

But R-CALF instead claims they're sure Canada would find more cases if they just tested an adequate number of cattle. But since the claim that Canada doesn't test enough cattle is false in the first place, their conclusion is false. And their implication that Canada has already discovered too many cases to qualify for minimal risk category is also false.

R-CALF's hue and cry that if Canada tested more, they would find more cases is similar to the Liberal Activists Group (LAG) philosophy that we ought to reduce or eliminate beef consumption because we might find some correlation to some disease in the future, so just to be on the safe side, we should quit now. After all, we "all know" that beef eating is not good for us - this just gives us an excuse, if we need one.

The fact is, we don't "all know" that Canada has a higher rate of BSE in its animal herd than most of the world believes. R-CALF just wants us to think it is so. That doesn't make it true. Repeating a falsity over and over is a LAG technique. It doesn't change the facts.


We understand some of you are also having difficulty accessing files on R-CALF's Web site. Therefore, we are providing a link to the PDF of R- CALF's report through the AFF Web site.


Here is R-CALF's Position Paper on the supposed inadequacies of the Canadian surveillance program (PDF on AFF site). AFF does not endorse their opinions. We provide this as a convenient reference for our readers only.

*"Inadequacy of Canada's BSE Surveillance Program," R-CALF, 4/28/05

[farmers_son]

It occurs to me that this rhetoric only serves to draw attention away from the fact that the U.S. has BSE in their herd and are deliberately not finding it.

This Canada beef is dangerous, Canada beef is fine;Canada does not test enough cattle, Canada tests more than they are required to; good cop, bad cop thing they have going on south of the border is just glossing over the real problem that the U.S. has chosen to hide its BSE reality.

I am not suggesting that U.S. beef is not safe because they do have food safety measures in place such as SRM removal but all this talk about Canada is a diversionary tactic that conveniently overlooks the undisputable fact that Canada and the U.S. were both following identical harmonized BSE prevention measures for the last 10 or 15 years and that the risk of BSE, although minimal, is probably similar in both countries.

As long as they can keep pointing the finger at Canada maybe no one will notice the U.S. has BSE too.

[kato]

You got that right...