Conferees vote to delay COOL start for two years

ROD SMITH, Staff Editor

Cooler congressional heads prevailed last week as House and Senate conferees approved an omnibus spending package with a provision that delays implementation of mandatory country-of-origin labeling (COOL) for two years.

The omnibus package provides $390 billion to cover more than 50% of government spending for the current fiscal year, which began Oct. 1, and must be voted as one bill when congress returns from Thanksgiving recess next week. As such, Feedstuffs sources both for and opposed to mandatory COOL said they expect the delay will stand.

The House is scheduled to consider the bill Dec. 8, after which it will go to the Senate. The package funds 11 cabinet departments, including the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and several government agencies.

Conferees moved the provision to delay implementation of mandatory COOL to allow livestock producers -- whose community is badly divided over the issue -- packers and retailers to work through problems with a mandatory program, and both the National Cattlemen's Beef Assn. (NCBA) and National Pork Producers Council (NPPC), which are opposed to a mandatory program, issued statements that they will begin looking at an alternative voluntary program.

COOL was written into the 2002 farm bill (Feedstuffs, April 29, 2002) and would have required that all beef, pork, lamb and seafood merchandised at retail be labeled, as of Oct. 1, 2004, as to the country, or countries, of origin of the animal, or animals, from which the meat product came.

The law also covers fresh fruit and produce and peanuts but does not cover poultry or any food moved via foodservice.

The Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS), the USDA agency that was assigned responsibility to develop a COOL rule, issued guidelines for voluntary labeling for use prior to the mandatory rule (Feedstuffs, Dec. 2, 2002) and considered public comment in developing the final rule that was issued last month (Feedstuffs, Nov. 3).

The guidelines and rule have been criticized by NCBA, NPPC, the American Meat Institute (AMI) that represents packers and the Food Marketing Institute (FMI) that represents supermarkets for what would be burdensome and costly requirements to document country of origin that the trade organizations said would be passed back to producers as lower prices for livestock or forward to consumers as higher prices for meat, or both, decreasing competitiveness and demand for beef and pork.

The groups said this could drive smaller producers, meat companies and retailers out of business.

At the same time, R-Calf USA, the National Farmers Union, the Western Organization of Resource Councils (WORC) and other producer representatives -- while also critical of the burdens that they said AMS wrote into the rule -- have strongly supported mandatory COOL on the basis that consumers have a right to know the country of origin of their food purchases.

R-Calf hosted a conference two weeks ago in which cattle producer representatives from 10 states met to identify ways to de-burden the rule and reported significant progress.

The controversy led House Agriculture Committee chair Henry Bonilla (R., Texas) to insert language in the House agriculture appropriations bill that would delay enforcement of the rule for beef and pork for one year (Feedstuffs, June 23), and that led to a resolution in the Senate that instructed its conferees to the House-Senate agriculture appropriations conference not to accept any delay in implementation (Feedstuffs, Sept. 15).

However, the two chambers combined the several spending bills into the omnibus package that left little opportunity for Senate conferees to carry out the Senate's wishes. The delay, in fact, was expanded to cover all commodities covered in the law except captured fish and was expanded to two years.

NCBA president Eric Davis, an Idaho producer, noted that the mandatory rule would have affected just 5% of all imported beef -- most of which moves through foodservice and would have been exempted from labeling -- and said this would have been "ridiculously" burdensome and unfair to U.S. beef cattle producers.

He said NCBA will take advantage of the delay to "reach out" to producers, packers and retailers to develop a labeling program that's voluntary and promotes U.S. beef and producer profitability. He said the delay "is a clear indication that Congress is willing to give us time to work this out.

NPPC president Jon Caspers, a pork producer from Swaledale, Iowa, called the delay "a big win" for U.S. pork producers and said NPPC will also seek a voluntary program.

He also said NPPC will continue its support of a mandatory, national animal identification program to assure rapid traceback to farms of origin in the event of an animal disease or other emergency, and he suggested that such a system would allow consumers greater confidence in the safety of the U.S. food supply.

The Texas Cattle Feeders Assn., Texas & Southwestern Cattle Raisers Assn., Texas Pork Producers Assn. and Texas Produce Assn. issued a joint statement that the delay provides "breathing space to secure much-needed changes in the law" and work toward "a market-driven labeling program."

R-Calf, WORC and other groups did not release statements in time for this issue of Feedstuffs, which went to press last Wednesday. However, in a statement earlier last week as word of the conference's decision started to leak, R-Calf president Leo McDonald said conferees were "being misled by special interest groups ... purporting to represent producers" but actually carrying the interest of packers and other segments of the meat trade.

He said "millions of members" of the cattle, farm and consumer communities support mandatory COOL, and he said the membership of the special interest groups "pale by comparison."

In a similar statement issued earlier last week, Farmers Union president Dave Frederickson said a delay would be "a travesty" in that consumer interests would lose out to packer, processor and retailer pressure. He said the law, "addressed in the light of the day, has had broad, bipartisan support."

Copyright Feedstuffs, Miller Publishing Company