June 12, 2009

 

Urgent action is needed to restore the viability of the US cattle industry, said Bill Bullard, CEO of national cattle producer organisation R-CALF USA.

 

To preserve the viability of independent US cattle producers, the USDA must restore the health of the domestic cattle herd and the safety of local beef, Bullard said.

 

He said the USDA must also restore the competitiveness of the cattle industry by enforcing antitrust laws, prohibiting anti-competitive practices and include protections in trade policy that recognise the supply sensitive nature of the US cattle industry.

 

Bullard presented the USDA with related charts and graphs, with one chart showing that the US cattle feeding industry suffered 22 consecutive months of financial losses from June 2007 to March 2009, with losses exceeding US$300 per animal for several of those months.

 

However, the chart also showed that retail beef prices remained at or near record levels throughout that period.

 

The marketplace has become inefficient and inequitable for cattle producers and beef consumers, Bullard said.

 

The industry is shrinking fast, and about 19,000 US cattle operations have been leaving the industry since 1996, he said, adding that the US cattle herd continues in its 13th year of liquidation and that beef produced from US cattle has remained stagnant for 13 years.

 

If the USDA does not make the requested changes, the cattle industry will end up the same as the US dairy industry where 80 percent of US dairy farms that were in operation in 1980 have left the industry, leaving only 67,000 dairies in the entire US in 2009, Bullard warned.

 

He said the same has happened in the US hog industry, where 90 percent of hog operations in 1980 have disappeared, leaving fewer than 65,000 hog operations in the US in 2009.

 

The US cattle industry is going toward corporate industrialisation that devastated the independent structure of the hog and dairy industries, turning them into highly concentrated and vulnerable corporate production systems, according to Bullard. 

 

To preserve the independent structure, Bullard said, the USDA should reverse its over-30-month rule that allows older cattle from Canada, where BSE outbreaks continue to be reported, to freely enter the US; initiate a rulemaking to prohibit the anti-competitive use of captive supply cattle by major meatpackers; and to abandon the National Animal Identification System (NAIS) plan.