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- Farm Bureau says
Keep APHIS Inside USDA
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- American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) President Bob Stallman commended President Bush for his leadership on the issue of homeland security and expressed the support of the nation’s largest general farm organization for the proposed Homeland Security Department.
“The need to protect and reduce the vulnerability of the United States to terrorism and to assist in the recovery from terrorist attacks are goals that are vitally important to agriculture,” Stallman testified at a House Agriculture Committee hearing on the issue.
“Since the business of agriculture is to help ensure that every American has an abundant and safe food supply, the U.S. government must take steps to minimize or prevent terrorist activities that may be directed toward American agriculture,” Stallman said.
The president has proposed to move the Agriculture Department’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) to the new Homeland Security Department. Stallman said moving APHIS border security and port of entry inspection functions would help prevent intentional introductions of plant or animal diseases and protect the U.S. food production system from terrorist attack.
However, he pointed out that many other APHIS functions and programs important to U.S. agriculture do not fit within a new department that deals with terrorism.
The agency’s jurisdiction, he said, includes important agriculture programs that control predatory animals, facilitate trade by certifying the health of cross-border animals and plants, regulate the humane treatment of animals, and help prevent and eradicate animal and plant diseases devastating to agriculture, such as bovine tuberculosis which has been found in wildlife and domestic cattle herds in Michigan.
Farm Bureau is concerned that these vital agriculture programs, which Stallman called “the envy of the world,” could disappear or become less of a priority if they are absorbed into the new department.
“AFBF has worked diligently over the past several decades to help develop many of these programs to assist today’s producers with a variety of production issues,” Stallman testified. “To see these programs face possible reduction or extinction is not good policy either for the government or for agricultural producers.”
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