The United States can avoid billions of dollars in retaliatory tariffs by switching to voluntary country-of-origin labels (COOL) for beef and pork, said the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Agriculture Committee. “This approach is a pathway to finding a viable solution,” said Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow in unveiling a two-page bill that would create a voluntary label in place of the current system that requires packages of meat sold in grocery stores to say where the animals were born, raised, and slaughtered. The WTO has ruled the labels discriminate against meat and livestock from Canada and Mexico.
Stabenow called her plan “a viable alternative” and released it ahead of a Senate Agriculture hearing today on the next U.S. step on COOL. Chairman Pat Roberts, an opponent of COOL, said Stabenow’s proposal was “a positive step” toward “a resolution that prevents retaliation.” The House passed a bill to repeal labeling for beef, pork and chicken by a landslide, 300-131, on June 10. COOL is more popular in the Senate, so there was doubt if repeal would roll to an easy victory.
“Any discussion about a voluntary program must be preceded by a full repeal of COOL, as we have an obligation to our trading partners to come into compliance,” said Michael Conaway, the House Agriculture chairman. Even with voluntary labeling, the meat industry would face record-keeping costs, he said. But the National Farmers Union said Stabenow’s proposal “is a prescriptive solution to a very narrow problem identified by the World Trade Organization.”
The United States had a voluntary labeling system for meat a decade ago but there was little participation. The 2008 farm law made COOL mandatory for meat.
There is sizable cross-border trade in beef and pork, so Canada and Mexico, the Nos. 2 and 3 agricultural trading partners for the United States, focused their WTO case on them. The House bill added chicken to the repeal, although it was not part of the WTO case. Conaway said the poultry industry asked for inclusion.
While beef and pork were lightning rods for controversy, COOL quietly covers a large part of the U.S. diet – seafood, chicken, lamb, venison, goat, fruit, vegetables, pecans, peanuts, macadamia nuts and ginseng. COOL labels often are in small type and may appear on the front or back of a package. They are not as well-known as the Nutrition Facts labels, introduced two decades ago.
Meatpackers and retailers, along with the largest U.S. cattle and hog groups, opposed COOL from the start as costly and burdensome. Consumer groups say the labels are part of a shoppers’ right to know about food and to distinguish U.S. products from imports. Cattle groups from the northern Plains, who compete with Canadian livestock, also support COOL.
The USDA homepage on COOL is available here.