Local Groups, Unions Reject Both COOL Repeal, Voluntary Alternative
A voluntary country-of-origin food labeling law would receive scant support from U.S. industry and ultimately put consumers and U.S. agriculture producers at risk, said more than a hundred local food associations, unions and other advocacy groups on July 28. The organizations pushed Senate Agriculture Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kansas, and Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., to keep the current COOL laws in place, despite the looming threat of World Trade Organization-sanctioned retaliation against U.S. exports.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Timely, relevant coverage of court proceedings and agency rulings involving tariffs, classification, valuation, origin and antidumping and countervailing duties. Each day, Trade Law Daily subscribers receive a daily headline email, in-depth PDF edition and access to all relevant documents via our trade law source document library and website.
Big agriculture industry groups and other business leaders have recently pressured all-out repeal of the COOL law, while also rejecting the voluntary alternative (see 1506250027). Stabenow floated the bill in late June, and formally introduced it in recent days, alongside Sen. John Hoeven, R-S.D. (see 1507240019). Canadian Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz has said his country won’t accept the voluntary program (see 1506250063). Ritz has said Canada will level roughly $2.5 billion in retaliatory tariffs as early as the end of the summer, but WTO arbitration continues (see 1506190023).
The judicial process should be allowed to fully run its course, said the local groups, which include of Public Citizen and the Texas Certified Farmers Market Association, along with many others. “In past WTO disputes that the United States has lost, the United States has waited for the process to conclude and then has successfully avoided WTO-authorized trade sanctions by negotiating a settlement with the other country in the dispute,” said the letter (here). “Despite this successful track record, the House passed a measure to repeal COOL for beef, pork, ground meats and chicken in June – the first time Congress has acted to change a U.S. law before the completion of a WTO dispute process.”
That repeal bill sailed through the House (see 1506100067). COOL opponents have long-predicted the Senate will be a tougher task (see 1505270016). The letter criticized that repeal legislation as overreaching. “The House-passed COOL repeal legislation is particularly extreme in that it would roll back commonsense labels that the WTO actually supported or that never were raised in the WTO dispute,” the letter said. The legislation would repeal COOL for ground beef and ground pork as well as for chicken, but the WTO explicitly ruled that the COOL label on ground meat was WTO-legal, and the dispute never addressed chicken or other covered commodities.”
COOL repeal would infringe on the public’s right to know where they’re food comes from, said the local groups and unions. “Meatpackers won’t use it, consumers won’t see it, farmers and ranchers won’t benefit from it and Canada and Mexico have already bluntly rejected this so-called compromise,” they said.