WASHINGTON -- Seven Democratic senators led by Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., are urging Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack to revise the Bush administration's country-of-origin labeling rule for red meat because it contains a provision that allows meatpackers to put a multiple country-of-origin label on products that are exclusively U.S. products as well as on products that are foreign.
The Bush administration's published rule does not go into effect until March 16 and comes under the Obama administration's review of all Bush rules that had not gone into effect on Jan. 20.
In a letter dated Feb. 3, the senators wrote that the 2008 farm bill provision establishing the country-of-origin labeling program said that the multiple country label should apply to meat from animals not exclusively born, raised and slaughtered in the U.S., but that the Bush administration expanded the definition to use the multiple country label for muscle cuts from U.S. animals that are processed by a facility on the same day as foreign products and for ground meat if the facility had processed some meat from the U.S. within the past 60 days. If all products can be labeled as multiple country in origin, "there is no value in (labeling) and no benefit to the consumer," wrote Dorgan and Kent Conrad of North Dakota, Diane Feinstein of California, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Ron Wyden of Oregon, Russell Feingold of Wisconsin and Jon Tester of Montana.
National Farmers Union President Tom Buis also has urged USDA to revise the regulations, charging that the Bush administration wrote them to satisfy the Canadian government, which had filed a World Trade Organization case against the labeling program. Bush administration officials told Congress Daily before they left office that they had consulted with Canadian officials about labeling Dec. 16 and agreed that the United States would meet with Canadian officials again eight months after the date of the publication of the rule.
Chandler Keys, a lobbyist for JBS-Swift, the Brazilian-owned meatpacking company with large interests in the United States, said in an interview during the recent National Cattlemen's Beef Association meeting in Phoenix, that he considered the final rule to be "a government to government deal." Neither the ranchers nor the meatpackers affected by the rule were present when the Bush administration negotiated with the Canadian officials and made their final decision on labeling, Keys said.
