US animal rights group opposes USDA agency transfer
Date: 21-Jun-02
Country: USA
Author: Randy Fabi
The nation's largest animal rights group joined a growing chorus of opposition to the relocation of the Agriculture Department's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency.
The agency, known as APHIS, is among the 22 existing federal entities that will be folded into the new 170,000-employee Cabinet department.
Although mainly in charge of protecting U.S. agriculture from foreign diseases and pests, APHIS also has authority over such things as the treatment of animals in circuses, zoos and puppy mills.
Wayne Pacelle, senior vice president of the Humane Society, said moving animal welfare programs to the new department "is an obvious misfit."
"It is already difficult enough to get the USDA to adequately enforce existing animal protection laws," he said. "Moving these programs to the Department of Homeland Security would marginalize them even further."
Critics fear APHIS resources would be focused too narrowly on bioterrorism threats rather than on the wide range of agriculture diseases which can impact U.S. crop health and trade.
A coalition of more than 40 U.S. agriculture and veterinarian groups recently sent a seven-page document to the White House and Congress listing APHIS responsibilities that might be weakened under a new department.
These include regulating new genetically modified crops, issuing farm export certificates, and eradicating agriculture diseases already in the country.
The coalition said it has not yet received any assurances from the Bush administration nor Congress that APHIS programs would not be weakened by the move.
The biotechnology industry and some lawmakers, including Senate Agriculture Committee chairman Tom Harkin, Iowa Democrat, have also expressed reservations of the agency's relocation.
Lawmakers are hurrying to pass legislation to create the new department by the first anniversary of the deadly Sept. 11 attacks on the United States. Under the White House's proposal, APHIS would be lumped together under the same authority as the Coast Guard, the Customs Service and the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
APHIS, perhaps best known for screening visitors and cargo at U.S. points of entry, safeguards agriculture from pests such as citrus canker and soybean rust fungus and animal diseases like foot-and-mouth disease and mad cow.