Senate Agriculture chairman Pat Roberts told Feedstuffs he is “working overtime to reach a compromise” to repeal mandatory country-of-origin labeling (COOL) on cuts of beef and pork. But Roberts said he lacks a majority on the committee needed for an outright repeal of the labeling law. A faction of the committee, led by Democrat Debbie Stabenow and Republican John Hoeven, wants to replace mandatory labeling with a voluntary system. Roberts said voluntary labeling would not be acceptable to Canada.
Lawrence MacAulay, newly appointed as Canada’s agriculture minister, said last week that the Trudeau administration seeks a full repeal of COOL. “They [U.S. officials] understand the issue and I think they understand that if all fails that [retaliatory tariffs] could happen,” MacAulay told news site iPolitics.
The WTO has ruled that COOL discourages import of meat and livestock from Canada and Mexico. It is expected to rule on Dec. 7 on requests by the two nations to impose more than $3 billion in retaliatory tariffs on U.S. goods. Their goal, however, is U.S. repeal of COOL, which was enacted as part of the 2002 farm law and became mandatory in 2009. The House passed a repeal bill, covering beef, pork and chicken, on a 300-131 vote, in June, three weeks after WTO issued a final ruling against the United States.
Meatpackers and food companies opposed COOL from the start as an expensive bookkeeping headache, and have fought for years to get rid of it. Beef and pork were the lightning rods for the WTO challenge because of sizable cross-border trade in meat and animals, but COOL also applies to poultry, lamb, goat, venison, seafood, fruits and vegetables, peanuts, pecans, macadamia nuts and ginseng.