Agricultural News
Tell Trump Transition Team About Heitkamp - Agribusiness Freedom Foundation's Dittmer Sounds Off
Tue, 13 Dec 2016 16:24:08 CST
The following article is an opinion piece authored by Steve Dittmer, executive vice president of the Agribusiness Freedom Foundation. You can reach Dittmer at 719-495-0401 or by email at steve@agfreedom.org.
If you want to have early impact on the Trump administration's agricultural policy, get thee to a keyboard. In the last couple days, it has developed that Trump's transition team is favoring Democrat Sen. Heidi Heitkamp for the Secretary of Agriculture cabinet post.
Some of you might ask, "Who is Heitkamp?" A key answer is that she is the senator from an agricultural state who not only introduced Leo McDonnell to a Senate Agriculture hearing as a supporter of mCOOL but concurred with his position. If that isn't enough, she also is a supporter of the other major headache for free market agriculture refusing to die in the waning days of the Obama administration, a resurrection of J. Dudley Butler's GIPSA Rule.
While stories emanating from Washington emphasize that Heitkamp sided with mainstream agriculture on GMO legislation and water issues, the mCOOL and GIPSA issues got little attention. Obviously, many livestock producers, indeed, the whole meat producing chain, considered those two issues at the top of the list of terrible things we have had to fight. Untold hundreds of millions of dollars were spent and lost on the disastrous mCOOL experiment gone wrong in recent years. Not allowing packers to pay premiums for higher quality animals or carcasses and making the meat industry the only place for lawyers to go after big corporations like packers without anyone having to prove injury are just two of the horrible ideas in the previous GIPSA Rule.
Devotees of the free market, of high quality beef and pork, of all the proliferation of special quality and specific characteristic meat programs, like "natural" or "CAB," were hoping the resurrected form of the GIPSA Rule would die with the Obama administration. Appointing someone like Heitkamp would likely give the Rule new life and with Trump's saber rattling on trade, be a terrible one-two punch to a segment that voted heavily for Trump.
Heitkamp also opposes repealing Obamacare, favored raising taxes on higher earners and opposed a bill requiring the completion of the southern border fence, according to her answers to questions and voting records on the "Votesmart" website.
There are some political angles the politicians are thinking about, including the chance to elect a Republican to the vacated seat and the chance to add both a female and a Democrat to the Cabinet. But those considerations need to take a back seat to the good of animal agriculture.
There is no specific way to comment on transition team activities but you can go to the transition team's site and where it asks for "How do you want to Make America Great?" express your thoughts on how not to make America great by appointing an ag secretary like Heitkamp that favors dismantling the marketing system for cattle and hogs built by producers, feeders, packers, retailers and foodservice to serve the consumer or opposes free trade with our meat customers worldwide.
Click here for Transition Team site.
You can also contact your member of Congress' offices to express your opinion and ask them to pass on the message.
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