#eats act

Marina Bolotnikova at Vox:

Every five years, farm state politicians in Congress perform their fealty to Big Ag in a peculiar ritual called the Farm Bill: a massive, must-pass package of legislation that dictates food and farming policy in the US. 

At the urging of the pork industry, congressional Republicans want to use this year’s bill to undo what little progress the US has made in improving conditions for animals raised on factory farms. The House Agriculture Committee late last month advanced a GOP-led Farm Bill with a rider designed to nullify California’s Proposition 12 — a landmark ballot measure, passed by an overwhelming majority in that state in 2018, banning extreme farm animal confinement — and prevent other states from enacting similar laws.  Prop 12, along with a comparable law in Massachusetts passed by ballot measure in 2016, outlaws the sale of pork produced using gestation crates — devices that represent perhaps the pinnacle of factory farm torture. While many of the tools of factory farming are the product of biotech innovation, gestation crates are deceptively low-tech: They’re simply small cages that immobilize mother pigs, known as sows, who serve as the pork industry’s reproductive machines.  Sows spend their lives enduring multiple cycles of artificial insemination and pregnancy while caged in spaces barely larger than their bodies. It is the equivalent to living your entire, short life pregnant and trapped inside a coffin. 

Ian Duncan, an emeritus chair in animal welfare at the University of Guelph in Canada, has called gestation crates “one of the cruelest forms of confinement devised by humankind.” And yet they’re standard practice in the pork industry.  While Prop 12 has been celebrated as one of the strongest farm animal protection laws in the world, its provisions still fall far short of giving pigs a humane life. It merely requires providing enough space for the sows to be able to turn around and stretch their legs. It still allows the use of farrowing crates, cages similar to gestation crates that confine sows and their nursing piglets for a few weeks after birth. And about 40 percent of pork sold in California is exempt; Prop 12 covers only whole, uncooked cuts, like bacon or ribs, but not ground pork or pre-cooked pork in products like frozen pizzas.  The pork lobby refuses to accept even those modest measures and has sought to link Prop 12 to the agenda of “animal rights extremists.” It has also claimed that the law would put small farms out of business and lead to consolidation, even though it is the extreme confinement model favored by mega factory farms that has driven the skyrocketing level of consolidation seen in the pork industry over the last few

For nearly six years, instead of taking steps to comply with Prop 12, pork lobbyists sued to get the law struck down. They lost at every turn. Last year, the US Supreme Court rejected the industry’s argument that it had a constitutional right to sell meat raised “in ways that are intolerable to the average consumer,” as legal scholars Justin Marceau and Doug Kysar put it. 

[...]

Overturning Prop 12 would be extreme, and it could have far-reaching consequences

Several other states have gestation crate bans, but the California and Massachusetts laws are unique because they outlaw not just the use of crates within those states’ borders, but also the sale of pork produced using gestation crates anywhere in the world. Both states import almost all of their pork from bigger pork-producing states (the top three are Iowa, Minnesota, and North Carolina), so the industry has argued that Prop 12 and Massachusetts’ Question 3 unfairly burden producers outside their borders. California in particular makes up about 13 percent of US pork consumption, threatening to upend the industry’s preferred way of doing business for a big chunk of the market. 

The California and Massachusetts laws also ban the sale of eggs and veal from animals raised in extreme cage confinement. Both industries opposed Prop 12 before it passed but have largely complied with the law; neither has put up the fierce legal fight that the pork industry has, led by Big Meat lobbying groups like the National Pork Producers Council, the North American Meat Institute, and the American Farm Bureau Federation. 

House Agriculture Committee chair Glenn Thompson (R-PA), who introduced this year’s House Farm Bill last month, touts “addressing Proposition 12” as a core priority. The legislation includes a narrowed version of the EATS Act (short for Ending Agricultural Trade Suppression), a bill introduced by Republicans in both chambers last year to ban states from setting their own standards for the production of any agricultural products, animal or vegetable, imported from other states. 

The Farm Bill language has been tightened to focus solely on livestock, banning states from setting standards for how animal products imported from other states are raised. It is less extreme only in comparison to the sweeping EATS Act, but also more transparent about its aim to shield the meat industry from accountability. At the Farm Bill markup on May 23, when the legislation passed committee, Thompson urged his colleagues to protect the livestock industry from “inside-the-beltway animal welfare activists.”  The provisions slipped into the Farm Bill may have consequences that reach far beyond the humane treatment of animals. They “could hamstring the ability of states to regulate not just animal welfare but also the sale of meat and dairy products produced from animals exposed to disease, with the use of certain harmful animal drugs, or through novel biotechnologies like cloning, as well as adjacent production standards involving labor, environmental, or cleanliness conditions,” Kelley McGill, a legislative policy fellow at Harvard’s Animal Law & Policy Program who authored an influential report last year on the potential impacts of the EATS Act, told me in an email. 

[...]

Why this Farm Bill faces long odds

Despite the monumental effort from the pork lobby and its allies, the odds of this year’s Farm Bill nullifying Prop 12 appear slim. Democrats, who control the Senate, oppose the House bill’s proposed cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which makes up about 80 percent of the bill’s $1.5 trillion in spending, and its removal of so-called climate-smart conditions from farm subsidies made available by the Inflation Reduction Act. Members of the House Freedom Caucus, on the other hand, are likely to demand steeper cuts to SNAP, formerly known as food stamps. 

The broader EATS Act has been opposed by more than 200 members of Congress, including more than 100 Democratic representatives and several members of the Freedom Caucus; Prop 12 nullification language is not included in the rival Senate Farm Bill framework introduced by Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI). Many lawmakers and other observers consider the House bill dead on arrival, which would mean that a Farm Bill may not get passed until 2025.  Prop 12’s pork regulations, meanwhile, took full effect in California at the start of this year after two years of delay due to the industry’s legal challenges. After implementation, prices for pork products covered by the law abruptly increased by about 20 percent on average, a spike that UC Davis agricultural economist Richard Sexton attributes to the pork producers’ reluctance to convert their farms to gestation crate-free before they knew whether Prop 12 would be upheld by the Supreme Court. 

Kenny Torrella at Vox:

You may not have noticed it, but the grocery store egg aisle has increasingly been going cage-free. In 2015, just a few percent of eggs sold in the US came from hens that weren’t confined in tiny cages. Today, it’s close to 40 percent. That swift change has come in part because eight states have prohibited the sale of eggs from caged hens; some of those states have also prohibited the sale of pork and veal from cruelly confined animals. While some cage-free conditions are far from humane, the shift in farming practices represents one of the few examples of progress in the decades-long fight against animal factory farming. Now a GOP-led bill in Congress could blow it all up. The EATS Act, short for Ending Agricultural Trade Suppression, was introduced last month by Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS) with a companion bill in the House from Rep. Ashley Hinson (R-IA), and would prohibit state and local governments from setting standards for how agricultural products imported from other states are produced. The bill’s language is not only sweeping, but vague, and some of its potential effects are unclear. For example, it covers the “preharvest” production of agricultural products, but “preharvest” isn’t defined.

If enacted, and if it were to survive likely court challenges, the EATS Act would open up all those cage-free laws to lawsuits, potentially erasing decades of progress for animals suffering on factory farms. The bill would also threaten other farmed animal welfare laws, like California’s and New York City’s prohibitions on the sale of foie gras, a product made by force-feeding ducks and geese. (Disclosure: Prior to Vox, I worked at animal welfare groups that advocated for cage-free laws and opposed legislation similar to the EATS Act.)

A Vermont law concerning genetically modified food provides an example as to how passage of the EATS Act could play out. The 2014 law required food producers that use genetically modified ingredients to disclose the use of the technology on their product labels, but in 2016, shortly after it went into effect, Congress passed a watered-down version of the law that preempts state law, essentially nullifying Vermont’s regulation. Vermont’s attorney general decided to stop enforcing the original law rather than defend it in court, and state attorneys general with cage-free laws might take a similar course in response to the EATS Act. But the reach of the EATS Act could go far beyond animal cages. The bill is written so broadly that it could threaten some 1,000 other state and local laws and regulations that govern agriculture, from timber to beef to crops, according to Kelley McGill, a regulatory policy fellow at Harvard Law School’s Animal Law and Policy Program. It may even block state prohibitions on certain recreational drugs, like salvia and kratom, that aren’t federally banned.

“The scope is really, really broad — it could encompass basically anything raised on a farm,” McGill said. “Crops, livestock, but also potentially cats and dogs, exotic animals. It could also be said to include products that include just small amounts of crops — for example, medicines that include cornstarch as an ingredient.” The bill also gives anyone affected by a regulation the opportunity to sue to block its enforcement, and makes it easier to win a preliminary injunction by putting the burden on the state or local government — not the litigant — to prove it could likely win at trial, reversing the standard of how preliminary injunctions typically work, McGill said. While the sponsors of the EATS Act have one goal — to undo cage-free laws and prevent states from passing more — most agricultural laws have nothing to do with moral positions like whether it’s okay or not to confine an animal in a tiny cage. Rather, many are intended to protect consumers and farmers by improving food safety and preventing the spread of disease from livestock and plants across state lines. [...]

The origin of the EATS Act, and the chance of it actually becoming law

The EATS Act can be traced back to one of America’s most controversial politicians: former Iowa Republican Rep. Steve King. King was best known for his far-right views and outlandish racist remarks, ranging from the belief that whites contribute more to civilization than non-whites and that culture-mixing will lead to a lower quality of life, to wondering out loud how terms like “white supremacist” and “white nationalist” had become offensive. He also had a lot of egg-producing factory farms in his district that wanted to keep locking hens in tiny cages. So, King went to bat for them. In 2014 and 2018, he managed to get an amendment almost identical to the EATS Act in the House versions of the farm bill, which is passed every five years; a large majority of the bill’s spending goes to fund SNAP benefits, also known as food stamps. Ultimately, neither amendment made it into the final version of the bill.

But according to Jake Davis, a Missouri hog farmer and farm policy consultant advising advocacy groups that oppose the bill, EATS Act supporters have a better shot to get it in this year’s farm bill than when King was in office. For one, the powerful meat lobby — after its defeat at the Supreme Court — is especially fired up. “The National Pork Producers and the American Farm Bureau Federation and their state affiliates are all making a full-court press for the EATS Act,” Davis said. “In my opinion, they are now seeing that [Supreme Court] ruling as sort of an affront to their way of doing business, and there is a lot of motivation ... to getting it in the [farm] bill. And you’re seeing politicians reflect that advocacy.”

For one, Hinson and Marshall don’t have the baggage King did. In the weeks before the passage of the 2018 farm bill, King lost support from the National Republican Congressional Committee and some corporate donors after refusing to say whether or not he identified as a white supremacist (anger from Republican leaders reached a boiling point weeks after the farm bill passed and he was stripped of committee assignments).

Hinson’s bill also has much more support — 23 cosponsors to King’s two in 2018 — and Davis said supporters of the EATS Act appear to be more vocal about their support than they were of King’s amendment, especially in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold California’s Prop 12 law.

The EATS Act, sponsored by Rep. Ashley Hinson (R-IA) and Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS), would overturn all cage-free laws and preempt state and local laws on agricultural standards.