| Max Thornsberry |
Country-of-origin labeling (COOL) for meat has become the law of the land, and you would think a pig had been stuck with a sharp butcher’s knife considering all the squealing coming from the beef packing industry and its trade associations.
The United States was the last country in the Western Hemisphere without some form of country-of-origin labeling of meat. COOL would never have come to pass in the United States unless consumer groups had joined the fight. A few thousand independent cattlemen were no match for the millions of dollars raised by those opposed to COOL, mainly the beef packing industry and grocery store groups. Once millions of consumers became incensed about melamine in their dog and cat food, COOL became a reality.
It wasn’t quite that simple, but almost.
The mandatory COOL law was written to accommodate trade with our neighbors. Born and raised in Canada or Mexico, and then slaughtered in the United States is a legal, proper label. Initially, the packing industry simply labeled all meat products “Product of the U.S., Canada, and Mexico.”
Simple, right? A simple North American label.
Wendy’s restaurants proudly advertise their hamburgers are made from North American beef. The North American label is a mixed label and is not what Congress intended for beef produced from cattle born, raised and slaughtered in the United States, but USDA kowtowed to the beef packing industry and provided a huge loophole in its COOL regulations to help those packers mislabel U.S. beef.
It is interesting that once COOL looked like it would become a reality, the poultry industry wanted in on COOL, actually petitioning to have poultry – something they had previously worked to exempt from COOL – included in the final COOL law.
Meat packers like Tyson labeled their beef with a mixed North American label, but their poultry was proudly stamped with “Produced in the U.S.,” in big bold letters on the front of the poultry label. Still is.
Yet, once forced to actually label red meat properly, several meat packers placed the origin label in such small letters it takes reading glasses to actually read it, if you can find it. Some muscle cuts of beef are beginning to be properly labeled, though purposely inconspicuously.
The mixed North American label misleads consumers when it is applied to beef that is exclusively of U.S. origin and does not provide consumers with the ability to exercise choice in the marketplace. Until meatpackers begin to properly distinguish beef from U.S. cattle from the beef from Canadian or Mexican cattle with a conspicuous and legible label, the marketplace will not function properly and the benefits of COOL cannot materialize.
Even though major beef packers were using the mixed North American label on all beef from U.S., Canadian and Mexican cattle, they are now making it difficult for Canadian and Mexican cattle to receive the mixed label (cattle imported from Canada and slaughtered in the U.S. are eligible for a mixed label that states “Product of Canada and U.S.”). This has prompted Canada and Mexico to file a complaint with the World Trade Organization (WTO). Cattlemen in the U.S. who fed Mexican steers discovered their foreign-born steers were being discounted by the packers, if they would even buy them. And this is going on even though the beef from those cattle is eligible for a mixed-origin label that includes both the U.S. and Mexico.
While all this is happening, USDA does nothing – by design, I think. USDA did not support COOL, did not want COOL, wrote rules the first time that COOL was enacted by Congress so onerous that they were unworkable. Along with the packing industry and the grocery industry, USDA is setting up COOL for a complete failure. I suspect the packing industry never had any intention of allowing COOL’s implementation in a workable manner, thereby forcing our trading partners to bring the case against COOL in the WTO’s world court.
If COOL was implemented as the law is written and if USDA would enforce the rules as Congress intended, consumers would be able to exercise choice in the marketplace, and the demand created by their choices would determine the relative value of cattle from the U.S., Canada and Mexico.
Today, unfortunately, these relative values for domestic and imported cattle are being arbitrarily decided by the meatpackers that are politically motivated to destroy COOL. The long-range goal of the packing and grocery industries is the withdrawal of COOL in the U.S., and they intend to accomplish it by making the issue so complicated and difficult that COOL becomes a greater burden than it is worth.
If this occurs, beef will be generic in the U.S., and the U.S. consumer will have no idea where their beef originated in the world and no choice as to which country’s beef they choose to cook for their family’s dinner.
The long-range goal of the huge multinational food marketing corporations is to acquire food anywhere in the world where it can be produced for the least cost. There are 180 million cattle in Brazil, and that number represents the cattle they can count. I visited a beef ranch in Venezuela in 1992 that ran 40,000 mother cows. There are lots of places in the world to purchase cheaply produced red meat.
As the world moves toward a one-world government ruling from Europe, it is this world government’s goal to produce food where it can be produced the most economically, where cheap land and cheap labor can be exploited by large corporations capable of operating with large economies of scale.
We have seen in this country what “too big to fail” has wrought in the financial industries. Do we really desire to turn over food production to multinational food industry corporations?
There basically is only one industry left in Rural America that is sufficiently dispersed to provide nearly every rural community with the opportunity to generate new economic activity. That industry produces a new set of wealth each spring, utilizing natural resources, the energy of the sun, and hard work. That industry is the independent cow/calf production sector of the cattle industry in the United States.
When that sector dissolves, the grocery stores will be full of food from around the world, and the average American will not have a choice as to which country’s beef his or her family consumes. That choice will be made by the multinational corporations that secure the beef from someplace in the world that can produce it most economically that particular year.
It will be generic beef.
I give us about 10 years, unless we fight for COOL, and win.
