COOL – Thoughts From The Middle of Nowhere

I've been staying out of the recent fray about <acronym title="Country of Origin Labeling">COOL</acronym> being waged by <acronym title="National Cattlemans Beef Association, shills for the big meat packers">NCBA</acronym>, AMI, R-Calf, and <acronym title="United States Cattleman's Association">USCA</acronym>. I've been really busy and haven't wanted to deal with the situation. The law is here and I have to pay the costs of it, so why argue about it. R-Calf and <acronym title="United States Cattleman's Association">USCA</acronym> are very aggressively pushing for it and AMI doesn't want it and <acronym title="National Cattlemans Beef Association, shills for the big meat packers">NCBA</acronym> is lukewarm about the situation. Google around and you can find out about the battle going on if you really want. What I wanted to do was talk about my take on this situation. n nIf you've read here very long you will know I reluctantly support <acronym title="Country of Origin Labeling">COOL</acronym>. I support it because the public has the right to know where their meat comes from, but reluctantly because it is going to cost the producers and consumers of beef a lot of money to do this. The consumer will be paying more for the information provided and I as a producer will relieve less money for my critters and have to provide some amount of ungodly amount of information to the supply chain to prove the cattle were born in the US. These in my opinion are fact. n nI know people will say that it will bring me money. They base this on the fact that consumers in surveys say that if they had the choice, they would buy US Beef. Sorry,I don't buy it. What consumers do and what they say they will do can be two different things. Fine they say they would purchase US Beef, but what would they do when confronted with the situation? Say you had some consumers in your average Wally World looking at the meat counter at some ground beef. Half of the ground beef prominently displays a label, US Beef, and the other half displays a label of Country Of Origin, Unknown. Now these consumers look at the beef and there is absolutely no visual difference in the beef, they look the same to the untrained lay persons eye. Then they look at the price. They see the price of the US Beef is say 20 cents a pound more expensive than the Unknown beef. This is a reasonable number for cost due to the massive amounts of paperwork that is going to be required by the government or meat packing plants for <acronym title="Country of Origin Labeling">COOL</acronym>. So here we have consumers faced with meat that looks the same to them but that has a significant price difference do to a little sign that says where it comes from. What would the majority of US Consumers do when faced with this situation? You got it, buy the cheaper product. Remember, these are the people shopping at Wally World where price is way more important than quality and that equals a lot of people in the US. I believe that the large majority of consumers will base their buying decisions this way. So it will be no significant help to the US Beef industry and just make a paperwork nightmare for us. n nLet's go beyond on the example I gave you. Let's place our selves in a higher end grocery store, in this area that would be an Albertsons. They usually have higher quality produce, meat and seafood. So, with <acronym title="Country of Origin Labeling">COOL</acronym> in effect you go up to the dispaly of chicken looking to buy a chicken with the government approved, Product of the US on it. You look around and can not find a single label proclaiming this. Why is this? That's simple, the <acronym title="Country of Origin Labeling">COOL</acronym> law we are talking about exempts chickens in the US. So all the people out there claiming cool will make our food supply safer, how does this do that when the largest source of protein in Americans diet is exempt from the law? Can anyone please answer this? I know that not much chicken is imported but why are we exempting the really big agri-business product, chickens? So beef and pork producers are going to have a burdensome paperwork requirements because of <acronym title="Country of Origin Labeling">COOL</acronym> yet chickens are exempt. Hell, it looks to me like the chicken industry did this to us to drive the cost of their main competitors products up and make chicken price seem relatively cheap to the average consumer. How's that for a conspiracy theory? n nLet me ask you another question. What percentage of meat consumed in the US is bought over the meat counter? I don't have the time nor energy to find this out but I guarantee you it is less than 50%. The large majority of meat consumed in the US is in the food service industry. Fast food, restaurant, cafeterias and so on. Is this meat required to be labeled for <acronym title="Country of Origin Labeling">COOL</acronym>? NO!!! So they can use any meat they want and have no <acronym title="Country of Origin Labeling">COOL</acronym> requirements at all. Again I ask you people, how does this make our meat supply safer? It doesn't. n nEverybody here knows my problem with <acronym title="National Animal Identification System">NAIS</acronym>. They tell us <acronym title="National Animal Identification System">NAIS</acronym> will stop a disease. I've made my sticking point on this all along, an ear tag never stopped a disease and this is true. The same thing goes here. How does a law that exempts the biggest source of protein in the American's diet and exempts the largest area of consumption of meat in the American diet, make the food supply in the US safer? It doesn't. It just cripples the industries they are requiring to do it. This whole <acronym title="Country of Origin Labeling">COOL</acronym> argument is based on making the food supply safer which it doesn't. I will add, just because meat is from the US, doesn't automatically make it safer. It can still get contaminated at the slaughter plant with e-coli or other things so a US label in and of itself does not make the food supply safer. People are operating under a false assumption here. n nI will again say at this point, the American consumer has the right to know this information. As long as this information is available at all levels on all products I will remove my reluctance from my support for <acronym title="Country of Origin Labeling">COOL</acronym>. This requires a change in the law which I have not heard anything about. All the arguments going on is about the beef industry doing this and how good, or bad it is. I even note that the Government has <a href="http://nowherethoughts.net/cool.pdf">opened the rule making for <acronym title="Country of Origin Labeling">COOL</acronym> up again</a>, comments can be left <a href="http://www.regulations.gov/fdmspublic/component/main">here</a> (I never could get this site to work with Firefox, only internet explorer). This won't change the law. Only Congress can do that. All we can do is comment on the rule making for the law and maybe the record keeping requirements for it. n nWhen it comes to record keeping for <acronym title="Country of Origin Labeling">COOL</acronym> I have a question. Why is it that US producers are going to be burdened with all the paperwork for <acronym title="Country of Origin Labeling">COOL</acronym> and imports are not? Since this is the US why not require all meat coming over our borders be permanently marked as foreign and if it doesn't have this mark, assume it is US. No costly paperwork requirements and little to no cost to consumers at the end of the supply line. Instead of there being a 20 cent difference in my example of earlier, there would be at most 1 or 2 cent price difference in the price of the US product and the non US product. Then I can see consumers buying US Beef willingly. The way it is now, it's only going to hurt me and consumers. n nI hope I have explained my stance on <acronym title="Country of Origin Labeling">COOL</acronym> succinctly. In brief, it will not help the beef industry, will cost the consumer more and will not perform its primary function of making our meat supply safer, but is the right thing to do. How's that for screwed up? n nKnowledge is power. Francis Bacon