Two COOL vehicles could collide in the highway bill
Congress is clearly on its way to repealing the law that requires packages of beef, pork and chicken sold in supermarkets to carry labels that say where the animals were born, raised and slaughtered. But there are rival plans on how to do it.
The World Trade Organization issued a final ruling on May 18 against the so-called country-of-origin labels (COOL), saying they are barriers to trade. Canada and Mexico say they will impose billions of dollars in retaliatory tariffs unless mandatory COOL is eliminated. The three nations – Canada, Mexico and the United States – are in an arbitration phase to decide whether retaliatory tariffs can be applied to U.S. exports, and if so how large they can be.
Eight senators from the Midwest and Plains unveiled a bill to repeal mandatory COOL and replace it with voluntary labeling for beef, pork and chicken. “We are hopeful we can get this done before we leave in August,” said Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, the top Democrat on Senate Agriculture Committee. Co-sponsor John Hoeven of North Dakota said, “It certainly is a possibility” that the language could become an amendment to the highway bill now under debate in the Senate.
Meanwhile, Senate Agriculture chairman Pat Roberts proposed repeal of COOL as a highway-bill amendment. For his amendment, he used the text of the bill passed by the House in early June to end mandatory COOL for beef, pork and chicken. “We can continue to discuss voluntary labeling programs similar to those already in the marketplace – once COOL is repealed,” said Roberts. House Agriculture chairman Michael Conaway took the same position.
Canada wants COOL repealed, and said the Hoeven-Stabenow bill was not sufficient. “The only acceptable outcome remains for the United States to repeal COOL or face $3 billion in annual retaliation,” read a statement by Canada’s trade and agriculture ministers.
Hoeven said Canada has a voluntary labeling system similar to the format proposed for the United States. A voluntary U.S. label, he said, “would maintain the Grade A label” for meat, meaning it was born, raised and slaughtered in the United States.
A decade ago, COOL was voluntary – labeling became mandatory in 2008 – but no meat processors used the labels. Senators said the food movement and a rise in interest in local foods has changed the atmosphere.
“Things have changed a lot in the last 20 years on how consumers look at labels,” said North Dakota Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, a supporter of the Hoeven-Stabenow bill.
Meatpackers and food companies opposed COOL from the start as an expensive bookkeeping headache, and have fought for years to get rid of it. House-Senate negotiators wrote COOL into the 2002 farm law. The WTO ruling created the best opportunity in years for opponents to overturn COOL.