July 20, 2007

 

US house panel agrees on meat origin labels in farm bill
 

 

A deal was reached Thursday (Jul 19) by the US House Agriculture Committee to include new rules for mandatory retail meat country-of-origin labelling in the 2007 farm bill that lawmakers said they believe address concerns over high costs to implement the label law.

 

The compromise would reduce paperwork for beef, pork and lamb producers and retailers, while also lowering fines for violations, Committee Chairman Collin Peterson said of the proposed changes to a law that is already on the books, but not scheduled for implementation until September 2008.

 

New categories of labels were also agreed upon, settling a long-running dispute mainly between beef packers, who oppose mandatory country-of-origin labels, and some cattle ranchers who think it will benefit them to distinguish their product from foreign imports.

 

A key dispute was over how to designate ground beef that often contains product from multiple countries. The deal reached specifies that instead of being marked as foreign, ground beef would be labelled as possibly containing beef from a list of countries.

 

Opponents of the labelling law had planned to introduce an amendment to the farm bill to weaken the labelling law by declaring that meat could be labelled US origin even if the animal it came from was not born in the US. Peterson said he believed the compromise reached Thursday would prevent such an amendment when the House version of the farm bill goes to a floor vote later this month.

 

The House Agriculture Committee approved the five-year 2007 farm bill late Thursday night after three days of debate.

  

American Meat Institute President Patrick Boyle told Dow Jones Newswires this week that the group had supported the amendment to allow for the US origin labels for meat that came from livestock not born in the US, but it would prefer not to have mandatory country-of-origin labelling whatsoever.

 

The cost to the industry would be huge, Boyle said.

 

Ultimately, mandatory meat origin labelling would lower prices paid to livestock producers, raise prices consumers pay for meat, or both, he added.

 

Wenonah Hauter, executive director of the non-profit group Food and Water Watch, said it was more important that consumers know the origin of what they eat. "In the wake of months of headlines about tainted imported foods, consumers are demanding to know where their food is from," she said.