Feedstuffs | June 30, 2003 | Issue 26 | Volume 75

House shows inclination to hold up, revisit COOL to avoid unintended 'beast'
Rod Smith, Staff Editor

The arguments for and opposed to country-of-origin labeling (COOL) that have been made several times at country listening posts in recent weeks were sounded at a grander stage last week as the House Agriculture Committee held the first full congressional hearing on the issue.

It was apparent from the opening statements of the committee leaders that most of the House believes the COOL provision that was written into the 2002 farm law was hastily and ill conceived and needs to be revisited for modifications if not termination.

It was also apparent from the comments of the committee members that there may well be a congressional move to mandate animal identification -- another unintended consequence of COOL as debate on the issue has provided the forum for larger issues related to animal health and homeland security.

The hearing, conducted June 26, followed the House Appropriations Committee's acceptance of the House agriculture appropriations subcommittee's budget recommendation for the U.S. Department of Agriculture for fiscal 2004 in which the subcommittee barred USDA from using any of the funding for the continued implementation of COOL as it applies to beef and pork in the fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1.

The language prohibiting USDA from pursuing beef and pork labeling was inserted in the budget recommendation by subcommittee chair Rep. Henry Bonilla (R., Texas) (Feedstuffs, June 23) and effectively means that the Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS), which has responsibility for implementation of COOL, will not write beef and pork into the final COOL rule.

The appropriations committee passed the agriculture appropriations without any attempts to amend the language, although COOL proponents sharply criticized it. Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D., Ohio), who favors an expansion of the law, said the measure permits meat packers "to hide" the origin of meat that's being fostered on consumers.

The appropriations still must pass the House and Senate, survive a House-Senate conference committee and be signed by the President, a process that Feedstuffs sources explained probably won't be completed until early September. The debate on removing beef and pork from the COOL law will be most contentious in the Senate, according to public affairs specialists with agriculture organizations in Washington, D.C. The House and President George Bush are not supporters of the COOL law, they said.

COOL was written into the 2002 farm law by a House-Senate conference at the urgence of certain senators and requires that, effective Oct. 1, 2004, all beef, pork and lamb muscle cuts and ground meat marketed at retail be labeled as to the country, or countries, of origin of the animal from which the product was produced (Feedstuffs, April 29, 2002).

COOL also covers fish, both captured in the wild and farm raised, as well as fresh fruit and produce and peanuts, but it does not cover food marketed through foodservice nor poultry.

AMS developed voluntary guidelines for COOL for use between now and Oct. 1 next year (Feedstuffs, Dec. 2, 2002) and will write a final, mandatory rule based on comments received and experience with COOL, if any, during the voluntary period.

Classic example of asking and getting
Subsequent to Bonilla's insertion of the beef and pork provision in the agriculture appropriations bill, House Agriculture Committee chair Bob Goodlatte (R., Va.) called for the agriculture committee hearing, the first to be held at the congressional level. (It's believed that committee member Rep. Robin Hayes [R., N.C.] will be conducting additional hearings at a subcommittee level.)

Goodlatte and ranking minority member Rep. Charles Stenholm (D., Texas) opened the hearing with comments that were critical of COOL as currently written and of the Senate's insistence on its inclusion in the farm law.

Goodlatte referred to a number of studies, both government and industry, that have been done on the issue and said they all concluded that mandatory labeling would involve few benefits and would push costs back to producers and forward to consumers. He noted that USDA's efforts to provide user fee-based, voluntary U.S. labeling have never been accepted.

Nevertheless, "despite a complete lack" of consideration of these facts and hearings on the issue, the Senate insisted on a COOL provision in the farm law, he said.

He and Stenholm both said the COOL law was poorly thought through and is, therefore, fraught with implications that were never anticipated -- from costs and verification processes that will be most burdensome on smaller producers, plants and stores to liabilities for mislabeled product.

"What we need to consider," Goodlatte charged the committee, "is what Congress has done what Congress intended?"

Stenholm said COOL is not true to its intended purposes, especially its supposed consumer right to know because it does not provide consumers a right to know the origin of food from foodservice or the origin of poultry.

He said it complicates existing important labeling, including food handling information, and said trading partners already have indicated that they regard COOL as a non-tariff trade barrier to which they may well retaliate against American products.

COOL is a classic example of where one should "be careful what we ask for least we get it," he said.

Identifying animals to 'shore up' food safety
During questioning of representatives for livestock producers and USDA who addressed the hearing, committee members drew a distinction between COOL as a food safety issue and a marketing issue.

Dr. Chuck Lambert, deputy undersecretary for marketing and regulatory programs at USDA, said COOL only speaks to the country of origin of the covered products and does not regulate or speak to the safety of the product. He said U.S. food safety inspection processes do not allow food imported into or produced in the U.S. to be delivered to the food supply if it's not safe or if another country's food inspection system is not equivalent to the U.S. system.

Cool and food safety are not related, and COOL and animal health are not related, he said, answering "yes" to a question from Rep. Joe Baca (D., Cal.) asking him if he would "bet your job on that."

Each of five producer representatives -- Alan Foutz, president of the Colorado Farm Bureau speaking for the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF); Dave Frederickson, president of the National Farmers Union (NFU); Leo McDonald, president of R-Calf USA; Jon Caspers, president of the National Pork Producers Council (NPPC), and Eric Davis, president of the National Cattlemen's Beef Assn. (NCBA) -- agreed to a question from Stenholm that COOL is a marketing matter.

McDonald sought to caveat that it could be considered a food safety issue if a consumer perceived meat from one country to be safe or unsafe but responded to a no-or-yes demand that COOL is a marketing opportunity.

Committee members seeking this clarification said those groups seeking to connect the discovery of bovine spongiform encephalopathy in one cow in the Canadian herd to COOL as if COOL is a food safety issue are doing a disservice to public understanding of the matter.

AFBF, NFU and R-Calf all support mandatory COOL. NPPC and NCBA support what Caspers referred to as "a workable, voluntary program."

Committee members spent some time suggesting that COOL does provide the opportunity to discuss an animal identification plan to assure animal health and food safety, and some suggested that such a plan should be mandatory.

Stenhold stated that "traceback will become a requirement," and "we need to take a good, hard look at this."

Rep. Collin Peterson (D., Minn.) said he was concerned that the COOL law prohibits USDA from imposing mandatory animal identification, which he said "we need" for animal health and food safety, especially given terrorism threats.

Rep. David Scott (D., Ga.) also cited terrorism threats as reason for mandatory animal identification and said he would have liked COOL to offer "a potential ... for shoring up food safety."

(The committee was advised by its witnesses that a government-industry coalition is preparing national standards for animal identification so various identification programs can interact with each other and permit animals to be traced back to farms for disease control and eradication purposes. The coalition meets for the first time this week.

)The national standards, though, do not involve a mandatory program.)

Lighting a short fuse for producer compliance
A large part of the hearing centered on the extent to which AMS is pursuing the spirit of COOL or trying to make it so onerous that producers will demand a congressional recall of the law.

Rep. Dennis Rehberg (R., Mont.), referring to how the voluntary guidelines indicate that a costly, exhaustive audit trail will be needed on every animal that will be eventually involved in the retail trail and to how simple it would be to identify animals and meat imported into the U.S., asked "how can it be that difficult to determine the origin of livestock?"

Rep. Earl Pomeroy (D., N.D.) charged that USDA and the Bush Administration "was dead set against this to begin with" and said AMS' cumbersome, expensive guidelines are a disservice to livestock producers "who are breaking their necks to produce top-quality (products) that gets mixed up with all this imported product that the consumer doesn't know where it came from."

Rep. Adam Putnam (R., Fla.) said AMS has written guidelines that are "as complicated as possible" when all that's needed is "a presumption of truthfulness" on the part of producers who can declare that their livestock is of U.S. origin. "It's you," he told the USDA representatives, "who have created a beast."

Rep. Frank Lucas (R., Okla.), in remarks that were not necessarily critical, said AMS has created a perception in the country that USDA doesn't support and doesn't want to administer COOL and has ,therefore, "made it so difficult, so evil, that it can't be done."

Lambert acknowledged that perception. "We heard this repeatedly," he said, "but the law is very prescriptive, very restrictive, in providing us any latitude."

USDA chief economist Keith Collins pleaded that AMS has not yet issued the actual, final, mandatory rule, and he said that rule will be based on the input that the department has received from comments submitted as well as from listening posts that were conducted around the country this spring. "Please don't assume" what the final rule will be based on the guidelines, he said.

Lambert said a proposed rule will be published this fall, probably in September, and a final rule, after allowing for "ample" public comment and an economic analysis, will be published next spring.

The timetable itself sparked considerable discussion about how USDA was leaving little time for the meat industry to prepare for mandatory COOL because it won't know what will be exactly expected for compliance until next spring and will need to be in compliance 5-6 months later. "That's a pretty short fuse," Rep. Max Burns (R., Ga.) said.

Other committee members and Caspers and Davis were more critical of the law than the AMS interpretation and said AMS is doing its best to get COOL ready.

(In a teleconference following the hearing, NPPC vice president for public policy Kirk Ferrell and NCBA vice president for public policy Chandler Keys, both of whom have been intensely involved in navigating their industries through COOL, said USDA should not be faulted.

("It's the law's fault," Keys said. "It was put together (late into the farm bill as an exchange for even less desirable legislation) and shoved down NCBA's throat and shoved down NPPC's throat and shoved down USDA's throat."

("The problem is mandatory COOL is a bad law," Ferrell said, "and now we have all this finger pointing at USDA (by certain congressional representatives) to escape the fact that they wrote a bad law. USDA is complying with the law as it's been instructed to do.")

Committee members did indicate they would be open to "cleaning up" the law to make the rule easier to develop, implement and enforce. Davis, at the teleconference, said he "sensed that the hearing was a starting point" for Congress to revisit the law and consider keeping it voluntary for beef and pork.

Caspers agreed. "We are seeing a sea change in opinion" about COOL in government and throughout the industry "that there is less and less support for mandatory labeling and more support for voluntary labeling."

Correction
The new web site hosted by a coalition of agriculture and food industry organizations to provide information on COOL is at www.countryoforiginlabel.org. The address was misreported in the June 23 Feedstuffs.

Copyright Feedstuffs, Miller Publishing Company