Ag Policy Blog

The House Rules Committee is scheduled to meet later Tuesday to lay down the rules for a floor debate on legislation to repeal country-of-origin labels for meat.

The bill represents a victory for Canada and Mexico following years of battles in the World Trade Organization against the U.S. over what the countries considered as discriminatory treatment of their livestock coming into the U.S. The bill also would be a victory for meatpackers that have resisted the labels because of co-mingled imported meat in products such as hamburger.

House Agriculture Committee Chairman Michael Conaway's staff issued a news release late Monday highlighting support for the bill by the COOL Reform Coalition, which has more than 100 various groups championing repeal of the law. The groups cite their fear of retaliatory tariffs by Canada and Mexico, which could be as high as $3.5 billion.

http://dld.bz/…

Countering support for the bill is another letter led by the National Farmers Union with 283 total groups supporting COOL. These groups argue it is premature for Congress to throw in the towel and maintain Canada and Mexico are merely throwing out allegedly high claims of losses that the WTO will reject. The WTO only authorized penalties based on actual impact, which NFU argues is significantly lower than Canada and Mexico allege.

“Polls show that nine out of ten Americans support COOL,” notes the letter, adding, “consumers continue to demand more and more information about their food and producers want to share that information.”

http://dld.bz/…

If the bill is coming to the House floor, it likely has the votes to pass. The fight over COOL could become more complicated in the Senate, which also may be more likely to wait and see what the WTO will send down on retaliation before acting on legislation.

Chris Clayton can be reached at Chris.Clayton@dtn.com.

Follow me on Twitter @ChrisClaytonDTN.

© Copyright 2015 DTN/The Progressive Farmer. All rights reserved.