Mandatory country-of-origin labelling is now law in the United States.
But according to a leading U.S. meat market analyst, it’s a lot less damaging to Canadian pig farmers than it seemed last summer, despite musings by U.S. agriculture secretary Tom Vilsack that the legislation should be broadened.
“The secretary of agriculture, when he was governor of Iowa … he did a couple of these go-out-and-talk-about-something-when-he-didn’t-know-what-he-was-talking-about then, and got out in front of the laws …. It’s kind of not unusual,” Steve Meyer said at the Manitoba Pork Council’s annual meeting April 7.
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“USDA tells me they will not enforce anything farther than what is written.”
What is now written are COOL rules that allow U.S. packers to label meat that could be from both U.S. and Canadian-born hogs as “Product of U.S. and Canada,” or words to that effect.
Those rules were finalized in January, weakening much stronger rules formulated last summer that would have forced packers to identify which meat was coming from which nation’s pigs. Such an insistence prompted many U.S. packers to declare they would accept no pigs that were born in Canada, even if exported as weanlings.
Meyer said he thinks most packers and grocers will choose to deal with pork that comes with a two-country label, which means Canadian weanling producers should see their situation improve once the smoke clears from the COOL implementation.
Many U.S. grocers are still leery of carrying pork that will be labelled as possibly partially Canadian, but Meyer expects that reluctance to evaporate once U.S. consumers are given a chance to buy or reject Canadian meat.
“I don’t think they’re going to mind. We kind of like things Canadian,” Meyer said. “I think they’re going to look at this and yawn.”
The Canadian weanling pig industry has faced a dire future because of COOL ever since the law behind it passed, but the January modifications to the regulations relieved many.
Meyer said the modifications came after the U.S. Trade Representative’s office insisted that the U.S. Department of Agriculture relax some of the written language so that the U.S. and Canada would not end up in another hog-based trade war.
However, Vilsack then unsettled the situation by suggesting packers voluntarily follow stricter standards than legally required.
Meyer said he doubted packers would be too worried by Vilsack’s comments and doubted U.S. legislators would spend much time reconsidering the COOL situation.
“Our Congress has a lot of other things on their plate right now,” he said.
“I think we’re going to deal with these (more acceptable COOL) rules for the foreseeable future.”
