The meat industry knows no shame, and you can put the National Pork Producers Council (NPPC) at the top of the list.
Back in 1985 Congress enacted a law that placed a fee on every hog farmer and exporter in the country. The money taken from farmers went into the National Pork Board (NPB), which in turn funneled a considerable amount of the funds to the NPPC. In 2000 NPPC received $36.5 million of the $48.1 million NPB spending budget raised from these required payments. This NPPC pigs-at-the-trough funding scheme became known as the "checkoff" program.
In 1999 a group called the Campaign for Family Farms (CFF) submitted a petition to USDA signed by over 19,000 hog farmers in the country who wanted to get rid of the mandatory NPB payments and replace it with a voluntary checkoff program. NPPC promptly filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with USDA asking for the names and addresses of producers who signed the petition so they could compile a list of people who threatened their checkoff cash cow.
When CFF went to federal court in Minnesota to stop USDA from releasing the petition list, NPPC intervened in the case and tried to force disclosure of the information. The court, though, denied NPPC access to the list of anti-checkoff farmers. Undeterred, NPPC took their case to the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals, where the higher court also sent NPPC packing, stating "[t]o make public such an unequivocal statement of their position on the referendum effectively would vitiate petitioners' privacy interest in a secret ballot."
Fast forward to today, and NPPC has a very different view about disclosure of names and addresses of the country's pork producers.
In 2013 the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) succumbed to political pressure and withdrew a proposed rule to collect baseline information from highly-polluting industrial meat operations. EPA's knowledge of this industry, which contributes significantly to nutrient impairment of waterways across the country, is so abysmal that the agency can't even tell us how many facilities exist or where they're located. From the Gulf of Mexico to the Chesapeake Bay, to Toledo, Ohio where the city's citizens just recently had their drinking water taken from them because of algae blooms in Lake Erie, communities across the nation suffer from the irresponsible dumping of excess animal manure from these facilities, while EPA wrings its hands.
After EPA's improper abandonment, a group of environmental organizations filed a FOIA asking for all the documents that EPA relied on to withdraw the rule. Included in the documents were a number of spreadsheets culled from publicly-available state databases and websites that listed the names and addresses of many of these factory farms.
Predictably, NPPC threw a fit when this public information was released to the public. NPPC president R.C. Hunt said he felt "betrayed" by the disclosure. Press statements by NPPC and other industry groups verged on hysteria, invoking empty claims of "ecoterrorism." Their uncontrolled fear mongering stopped just short of asking for the Administration to place the nation on red alert.
Last summer NPPC walked back into the same Minnesota court that sent them back to DC with their tails between their legs in 2000 and asked the judge to issue an order to prevent EPA from disclosing the names and addresses of these industrial facilities, the very same type of information they went into court in 2000 seeking to obtain for themselves.
In their recent filing with the Minnesota court, NPPC suggests that the 8th Circuit's 2000 ruling supports their newly invented position that the disclosure of names and address of industrial farms are disallowed because of "privacy" concerns. But that's not what the court said. It's not names and addresses of farms that the court held to be subject to a "privacy interest," but the checkoff program opinion of hog farmers reflected in the "secret ballot."
Hypocrisy is nothing new to the meat industry. Industrial agriculture, which relies heavily on federal and state taxpayer subsidies while denouncing any governmental interference in their non-control of their vast pollution problem, literally lives off hypocrisy. Their latest, hypocritical position on farm data disclosure is not based on any noble notion of sanctity of farmers - they proved they don't give a damn about that in 2000. Back in 2000, disclosure was good because they were fighting hog farmers who were threatening their funding, today its bad because they're fighting environmentalists who are concerned about the adverse impact from modern industrial agriculture on our waterways, communities and public health.
And that contradiction tells you where NPPC's real interests lie. It's not about farming, or farmers, or about being responsible and accountable, its is all about using whatever tactic is necessary, including attacking its own base, ignoring the facts and instilling fear to maintain NPPC's funding and political power.