After a landslide 38-6 vote in committee, Agriculture chairman Michael Conaway said the House might vote in early June on legislation to repeal mandatory country-of-origin labels (COOL) for beef, pork and chicken. The Agriculture Committee voted for repeal two days after the WTO ruled the labeling system is a barrier to livestock imports. COOL has been mandatory for U.S. meat since 2008.
Conaway said he was working with House Republican leaders for a prompt floor vote on repeal. Agriculture Committee members approved the three-page bill after less than half an hour of discussion that was dominated by warnings of retaliatory tariffs by Canada and Mexico on U.S. manufactured and agricultural products. “We are talking about an impact here in the billions and billions of dollars,” said David Scott, Georgia Democrat.
“I don’t think this is the best way to avoid retaliation and, quite frankly, I don’t think the Senate will be able to pass a repeal,” said Collin Peterson, one of the six Democrats to vote against the bill. He said repeal was a hasty over-reaction when the three nations still might find “a workable North American solution.” As committee chairman in 2008, Peterson engineered a compromise between meatpackers and livestock producers to get COOL adopted.
The Canadian Cattlemen’s Association called the committee vote “an important first step,” said the Toronto Globe and Mail. It said the Canadian Pork Council estimates hog farmers lost $3 billion in exports because of COOL.
Conaway, from Texas, the No. 1 cattle state, said COOL was a “failed marketing program [that] adds extraordinary costs with no – I repeat, no – quantifiable benefits.” Meatpackers and retailers complained from the start that COOL would be a costly bookkeeping headache. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers joined the call for repeal after Canada unveiled a broad-ranging target list for retaliation.
Consumer groups and the two largest U.S. farm groups have supported COOL as satisfying the consumers’ right to know where their food comes from. Backers say the labels will distinguish U.S. meat from imports at the grocery store. They have called on Congress to look for ways to revamp COOL to comply with the WTO ruling, or to force Canada and Mexico to prove to WTO that COOL actually damaged their livestock industries. The National Farmers Union says the weak economy is the real reason why livestock prices fell.
The labels, which say where animals were born, raised and slaughtered, often are in small type and may appear on the front or back of a package. They are not as prominent as the familiar Nutrition Facts label, introduced two decades ago.
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.
To read the text of the bill, Agriculture Committee releases about the bill, or to watch a video of the committee meeting, click here.
The USDA homepage on COOL is available here.