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A Proposal for
Monitoring and Enforcing Regulations
on Intensive Livestock Operations
Submitted by the National Farmers Union
Region 7 (Alberta)
To the Sustainable Management of the Livestock
Industry in Alberta Committee
Barrhead, Alberta January 31, 2001
Preface
The National Farmers Union welcomes this opportunity to bring the views
of its family farm members to the Alberta government. The NFU is a
direct-membership national farm organization that works on behalf of
family farmers and rural communities.
Intensive Livestock Operations (ILOs) and their regulation are
increasingly controversial. Many organizations and individuals believe
that huge, corporate-owned or vertically-integrated hog barns and feedlots
damage the viability of family farms and communities, threaten the
environment and water supplies, and threaten human health.
This brief will leave aside many of the larger issues of sustainability
and social and environmental damage resulting from ILOs, and address the
narrow issues of how government might organize its various levels to
effectively regulate ILOs.
The responsibilities of various levels of
government
1. The NFU recommends that
the Provincial Government retain responsibility for legislating a
Provincial Code of Practice for ILOs, Health Standards, and Environmental
Standards.
Health, safety, and environmental protection are the legitimate
jurisdictions of the Province. The need for consistency, to protect all
Alberta residents equally, requires provincial standards and legislation
for manure handling, watershed protection, odour, flies, and a host of
other factors that have the potential to damage the health of Albertans or
the quality of Alberta land, air, or water.
ILOs threaten surface and groundwater. One U.S. report documents over
100 spills or dumping incidents by large-scale livestock producers in one
year, 1999. (1)
The spills and dumping totaled more than 4½ million gallons. The
question of whether large manure lagoons will sometimes leak or spill
their contents has repeatedly been answered in the affirmative.
Because watersheds, rivers, and aquifers cross county and provincial boundaries,
provincial standards are needed to ensure that Albertans in one place are
not made ill by water contamination originating in a far county with lax
ILO standards or environmental regulations. The Provincial government must
take the lead in safeguarding the health of all Albertans, the safety of
workers, and the protection of the environment.
2. The National Farmers Union recommends that land use
determination and approval of individual operations must remain with the
Counties and under local authority.
While the determination of environmental, health, labour, and other
standards should be uniform and provincial, the approval or sitting of a
particular ILO should be made at the county level. Citizens and officials
of a particular county know their area, landscape, and whether any
potential problem area--bogs, springs--exist that should be taken into
account when sitting, approving, or rejecting a particular ILO.
Counties and local authorities should have the authority to add extra
conditions when and where they see a need. Provincial legislation should
form a floor in order to protect all Alberta residents with minimum
standards. Counties must have the power, however, to impose additional
conditions to meet specific local situations or concerns.
Armed with effective provincial standards, local Counties are the level
of government best able to apply those standards to the varying situations
that occur in a given county, Township, or quarter section, or patch of
wilderness. Further, testing and monitoring can be undertaken at the local
level. For instance, water testing should be undertaken by regional health
authorities.
Just as the Province makes laws which local police departments enforce,
provincial standards for ILOs should be monitored and enforced by local
authorities.
3. The NFU recommends that Counties encourage and
facilitate intensive public input into every level of the ILO approval
process.
Whether the ILO proponents and governments agree or not, a large and
growing portion of the public believes that ILOs threaten family farms,
water, and the environment. The questions surrounding the approval and
citing of ILOs are no longer only technical questions of soil structure or
topography.
The public must be able to speak on all issues relating to ILOs, and to
decide what constitutes the public's best interests and what steps are
necessary to protect those interests. Further, on many issues, local
residents possess the preponderance of knowledge, based on generations of
experience with local soil, water, wildlife, and the environment. That
knowledge cannot be easily gained from academic studies or satellite maps.
Local people have lived their entire lives on their piece of land and in
their community and they have "managed" and protected the
environment for generations. To exclude this rich body of knowledge and
"data" from the siting and approval process would be to condemn
that process to proceed half blind and veiled in ignorance.
The public must also be thoroughly involved because of the potential
for ILOs to affect many aspects of their lives. ILOs can threaten health,
lower property values, displace local family farms, cause mental anguish,
and alter the local economy. If democracy means anything, it means that
citizens have a right to collectively make decisions on matters that
affect them.
The Alberta government has increasingly become divided in its
loyalties: seeking to promote livestock expansion through ILOs, and
seeking to represent the public interest in regulating ILOs. Most citizens
believe that the government has failed to faithfully honour its divided
loyalties. Citizens regard the government with suspicion and have lost
faith that governments--provincial or county--can be trusted to properly
deal with the issues and threats posed by ILOs. Because of this,
government must not only ensure that ILO approval and regulation is
transparent--that citizens can watch--but also that citizens, in a real
and concrete way, can participate and help determine whether an ILO will
be approved in their community.
The decision to accept or reject an ILO can split a community. Public
consultation and participation in ILO approval is the key to eliminating
confrontation. Consultation and participation allow all community members
to understand and address the issues and to affect the outcome. People who
are shut out feel, not only harmed by the ILO and its effects, but also by
the approval process.
Canada is a democracy. As such governments undertake actions every day
with which particular individuals disagree. However, if that government
action was publicly debated and can be credibly construed to represent the
wishes of the majority, dissenting citizens accept the action and the
process. Citizens often do not accept ILO siting or approval decisions
because they feel shut out of a fundamentally undemocratic decision
process. Community objections, on both sides, can be reduced through a
thoroughly democratic and participatory process.
4. The NFU recommends that there be intervenor funding
available to interested parties and individuals.
One of the central problems facing the Alberta provincial and county
governments and citizens in the ILO siting and approval process is an
imbalance of knowledge between ILO proponents, on the one hand, and
citizens on the other. While ILO proponents have access to detailed
knowledge about their proposed ILO and access to necessary experts,
citizens are doubly disadvantaged: they lack specific knowledge about the
proposed ILO, and they lack the expertise to shape and articulate the
extensive knowledge they do have about their land and community.
Proponents, governments, and others often try to discredit the
knowledge and experience of citizens because it is less technical than
that of the proponents. The views and knowledge of citizens are discounted
and devalued, labelled "emotional" or "fear-mongering"
or "unscientific."
(2)
Intervenor funding improves the quantity and quality of knowledge
available to citizens and their organizations. Citizens, on both sides of
the ILO debate, can marshal data, contract experts, and prepare documented
interventions. Intervenor funding will also make it possible for all
citizens to bring forward the detailed knowledge of the area that is so
vital to a proper siting or approval decision.
Intervenor funding improves the quality of citizens' input and largely
removes the problem that ILO proponents identify as fear-mongering. The
antidote to fear and emotion is knowledge and communication: intervenor
funding makes this possible.
5. The NFU recommends that all costs of enforcement,
appeals, and intervenor funding should be paid for by the Province.
The protection of health, worker safety, and the environment are
provincial responsibilities. While county governments are well positioned
to monitor and enforce provincial standards, foster public input, and make
decisions regarding the approval or siting of individual ILOs, the
Province is legitimately responsible for funding such work.
Further, the protection of Alberta soil, air, and water quality is in
the public interest, and therefore all Alberta residents should pay.
Forcing counties to pay for what may be expensive monitoring and
enforcement forces local rural people--few of whom will benefit from these
ILOs--to shoulder the costs of protecting the environment and water of all
Albertans.
Provincial funding would also ensure equal and consistent application
of standard in all Counties. Without provincial funding, in poorer
counties, all aspects of the approval and enforcement process would be
compromised.
6. The NFU recommends that the Province develop a clear
definition of what constitutes a family farm so that it can properly
regulate industrial ILOs operations.
Corporate and investor-owned ILOs are not farms. The majority of
Canadians clearly see that these corporate-owned, multi-million dollar,
vertically-integrated operations are industrial enterprises and should be
treated as industries.
The Alberta government needs to work with its citizens and, especially,
its farmers to craft a clear and useful definition of a family farm. Such
a definition might wisely be built on a principle such as the following:
A family farm is an operation that produces food or other agricultural
products and where the vast majority of labour, capital, and management
are provided by family members.
In moving toward a legislative definition, one might add detail such
as:
A family farm may take the form of a farm corporation if the majority
of the voting stock is held by members of a family, related to one another
within the fourth degree of kindred or to their spouses, at least one of
whom is a person residing on or actively engaged in the day to day labour
and management of the farm.
Nebraska and other states have laws which clearly distinguish between
family farms and corporate, industrial operations.
Hutterite farms would clearly be family farms under any reasonable
definition of a family farm. The criteria is not merely one of size, but
of ownership and control and, arising from this, a reasonable expectation
of stewardship.
7. The NFU recommends that industrial ILO be subject to
appropriate taxation, environmental and labour standards
A clear definition distinguishing a family farm from a corporate
industrial operation would allow the government to properly protect
workers, collect taxes, and protect the environment.
It is illegitimate and dangerous to pretend that thousands of hog-barn
workers working for a distant, multi-billion corporation are the same as
family members or the hired hand on a family farm. Industrial ILO workers
must enjoy the same protections that workers in other industries enjoy.
Industrial ILOs, because they are often owned by huge and distant
corporations, need to be subject to appropriate environmental assessments
and standards.
Finally, these ILOs need to pay property taxes that are equivalent to
those paid by other rural industrial enterprises.
8. The National Farmers Union recommends that the
provincial/county approval processes for ILOs take into account:
- The effects of large, vertically-integrated ILOs on
family farms;
- The effects of vertical integration on the livestock
markets for family farms;
- The U.S. experience in states with a large number of
ILOs;
- Effects of ILOs on residential property values and
proper compensation for rural residents who suffer property value
losses;
- The lower quality of life and mental anguish that can
result from odour, flies, loss of use of property, loss of quality of
life, and loss of property value;
- Health and safety standards for ILO workers;
- Potential environmental effects of large livestock
production facilities and the attendant concentrations of manure; and
- The likely effects on the local economy.
Sustainability means living and producing in ways that are in long-term
harmony with social, economic, and environmental structures and in ways
that enhance those structures. Because ILOs often pollute water supplies,
because they displace family farms, because they threaten workers' health,
and because they degrade the environment and quality of life for
surrounding residents, it is unlikely that ILOs, as currently conceived
and executed, represent "sustainable" pork or beef production.
If the Alberta Government is committed to sustainability in more than a
superficial way, it has at its disposal a wealth of information on how not
to proceed. Government and citizens need not speculate about what the
future of hog production in Alberta might hold. We need only look to U.S.
states such as North Carolina that set off down the corporate ILO path
five or ten years ahead of us. In North Carolina, the environmental damage
has become so bad that the state is moving to ban earthen manure lagoons.
Other states, such as Nebraska, have seen the corrosive effects of
corporate-owned farms and moved to ban such ownership.
Across the U.S., citizens and governments are rethinking the
corporate-mega-barn-with-an-earthen-lagoon model of hog production. They
are also critically examining the negative effects of huge packer-owned
cattle finishing facilities. Alberta, on the other hand, seems committed
to proceeding with exactly the same livestock production models that have
proven so destructive elsewhere.
It will be impossible for Alberta to do anything other than repeat the
mistakes of other jurisdictions unless we thoroughly discuss all
aspects of ILOs. If we continue with the standard, failed model and if we
restrict official discussions surrounding ILOs to a narrow list of
technical issues, we will blunder down the same path as North Carolina and
other U.S. states. The NFU hopes that Alberta provincial and county
governments will have the wisdom and the courage to engage in wide-ranging
and extensive discussions with Alberta citizens on ILO issues. And we hope
that governments will act responsibly to expand the range of issues under
consideration when siting, approving, or rejecting ILOs.
Conclusion
Alberta is currently struggling through an energy deregulation debacle.
In California, deregulation has led to energy blackouts for the first time
since the War. The lesson should be clear: simply proceeding without
regulation does not magically create the stable, sustainable communities
or business climate Albertans desire. Lack of regulation, in this case,
seems to be leading to the kind of price volatility and supply uncertainty
that is toxic to business.
In a similar vein, well-conceived regulation of livestock production
can protect and enhance family farms, communities, local economies, and
the environment. Well-conceived and properly executed regulation is the
only possible way that we can move toward "sustainable" hog
production systems. The lack of effective regulation does not lead to
economic growth, stability, or sustainability. Often it leads to Walkerton
water, an unsafe blood system, volatile energy prices, and numerous other
policy errors that increase costs for citizens and businesses.
ILOs, because of their potential to pollute and to alter local social
and economic systems need prudent and effective regulation. It is the hope
of all Albertans that their governments are willing and able to fulfill
their important and critical roles in this matter.
Respectfully Submitted
by the
National Farmers Union
Region 7 (Alberta)
1 Clean Water Network and the
Izaak Walton League of America, Spilling Swill: A Survey of Factory
Farm Water Pollution in 1999, December 1999.
2 Attempts to discredit
citizens' knowledge and opinions in this way is clearly an attack on the
ability of local people to shape their own futures. For decades, citizens
without Ph.Ds in nuclear physics pointed out that nuclear power plants
threaten human health and the environment, and that electricity from such
plants would prove very, very expensive. Those citizens were marginalized
and accused of "fear-mongering." It turns out that those
non-expert citizens were correct and that scientific experts from the
nuclear industry and government were wrong. Today, no developed nation
would build a nuclear power plant, and Ontario Hydro is close to
bankruptcy due to "unanticipated" costs arising from its plants.
Attempting to limit debate to narrow, "scientific" questions, as
ILO proponents inside and outside of government often do, is an old tactic
used to deter citizens' participation and undermine democracy. |
