Feedstuffs | April 21, 2003 | Issue 16 | Volume 75

ROD SMITH, Feedstuffs Staff Editor

A number of front-line producer groups have submitted comments to the U.S. Department of Agriculture concerning country of origin labeling (COOL) as USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) begins moving the current COOL rule from voluntary to mandatory status.

Interestingly, both groups for and opposed to COOL handed in quite similar comments generally urging AMS to write a mandatory rule that would be less burdensome on producers. However, the Texas & Southwestern Cattle Raisers Assn., which represents 12,800 members who raise 3.6 million cattle in Oklahoma and Texas, passed a resolution urging Congress to outright repeal the mandatory aspect of the rule.

COOL was written into the 2002 farm bill and requires that all beef, lamb, pork and seafood and certain other commodities be labeled at retail as to their country, or countries, of origin and that labeling be mandatory Oct. 1, 2004 (Feedstuffs, April 29, 2002). COOL does not cover poultry or meat and seafood in the foodservice trade.

The law was implemented on a voluntary basis last year (Feedstuffs, Dec. 2, 2002).

The National Cattlemen's Beef Assn. said the mandatory rule should lessen the burden on producers to verify that cattle are of U.S. origin and should make promotion of the U.S. label "the number-one goal."

The National Pork Producers Council (NPPC) said the mandatory rule should define more clearly how producers are to verify that hogs are of U.S. origin and should minimize costs for producers to verify their hogs origin and for consumers to buy U.S.-labeled pork.

Both the cattlemen's group and NPPC have official policy positions opposed to mandatory origin labeling.

In particular, NPPC said AMS must address the continuing possibility that retailers may require "a costly animal identification and trace-back system to protect themselves" from penalties that may be imposed by government inspectors for mislabeled products.

The National Farmers Union said existing record-keeping systems, especially for imports, should be tailored to COOL's specifications and producers should be permitted to self-certify the origin of their animals.

The Organization for Competitive Markets said COOL needs only to "presume" that covered commodities are of U.S. origin unless identified otherwise, and only imported animals and meat products, therefore, need to be tracked.

The Western Organization of Resource Councils also said self-certification should be sufficient as every animal or meat product coming into the U.S. must be documented under U.S. food safety, homeland security and trade laws. AMS "messed up" when it indicated that every meat product sold at retail would need to have documentation and independent verification as to the origin of the animal, or animals, from which the meat was produced, the organization's livestock committee chair Mabel Dobbs, a rancher from Weiser, Ida., said.

COOL called 'bad legislation'

In a teleconference last week, NPPC president Jon Caspers, a producer from Swaledale, Iowa, sounded a stronger trumpet, calling COOL "bad legislation" and reemphasizing the need for direction for compliance and minimization of costs, saying that retailers may believe that they need to impose costly, cumbersome identification systems on producers to meet the law.

He said NPPC has raised COOL issues with legislators and suggested that Congress may conduct hearings to reevaluate the law, which he said several times would be far more successful if maintained as a voluntary program.

Caspers said COOL is "devastating" enough that reopening the farm bill is worth the risk of other farm measures being changed in the process of fixing COOL. (Feedstuffs sources have said they do not believe Congress needs to reopen the entire bill to look at COOL.)

NPPC board member Joy Philippi, a producer from Bruning, Neb., said the bookkeeping to document and verify as currently proscribed in the voluntary rule would require many producers to hire a consultant or employee for that purpose because producers cannot take the time away from their barns for the bookkeeping.

That would add costs and decrease their competitiveness, she said.

Philippi said Nebraska producers who had supported COOL, which she said she once did, are changing their attitudes about the law because where "we once thought a USA label would bring a higher prices, we now see" that the costs will more than offset the gains, if there are gains at all. "This can be very expensive," she said, referring to an earlier NPPC study that COOL could add $10 per head to costs of production (Feedstuffs, Feb. 17).

She also said a niche-type, voluntary program would be better, and Caspers and Philippi pointed to how 90% of all pork sold at retail under a mandatory rule would be U.S. origin, which would make U.S. pork the commodity product while Canadian and other imported pork would become the differentiated product.

Asked to comment on positions that only animals or product imported into the U.S. need to be documented, Caspers said USDA's experience has not been good with self-verification. He noted that USDA encountered outright "fraud" in its non-hormone beef program to where it had to close down the program and rewrite it to include documentation and control.

Philippi said self-verification has a tendency "to turn good folks into liars," not intentionally, but because without documentation, imported livestock tend to get lost in herds and even inadvertent misrepresentation could leave producers liable under COOL. She said the liability "could force many of us out of business."