Some weeks ago I wrote about $5 million worth of British food for Katrina victims whose distribution was stymied by bureaucrats at the FDA and the Department of Agriculture.
The story was generally ignored in the mainstream press although Cindy Sheehan couldn’t scratch herself without media analysis and TV camera crews following every finger-movement
The food was never used. It ended up being trucked around and then it was dropped off in an Arkansas warehouse.
It is still there.
These British Army military rations were requested as a donation for Hurricane victims by the US State Department.
The flight to the US cost British taxpayers almost $5 million dollars.
Trucks hauled the food to New Orleans to be given away, until they were literally chased down by Dept. of Agriculture inspectors –folks with a little too much time on their hands -who seized the rations because they contain beef or chicken, banned for import into the US from Britain under normal conditions.
Of course things were hardly “normal” in New Orleans and British troops in Iraq eat the very same ration packets every day by the thousands.
That didn’t deter the Agricultural police, they ordered the food not to be given away. And when some of it was handed out, to hungry people who needed it, they tried to take it back.
The British government is understandably not impressed, not even with the latest idea the State Department has considered: sending the food by plane to Guatemala for mudslide victims.
Apparently the food is good enough for Guatemalan peasants, but not OK for hungry Americans or Department of Agriculture lawyers.
The Guatemala idea won’t be happening anyway. The country is poor and doesn’t have vehicles large enough to move the heavy wooden pallets.
Meanwhile the thousands of cases of food sit in the warehouse. Taxpayers are carrying storage fees of $4,000 a week to keep it there and not eat it –but the food expires in 2006 anyway.
A new form of Agricultural subsidy for taxpayers.
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