Hey, I wrongly badmouthed the NPPC folks earlier today. They, of course, as I reported a number of times, were one of the few U.S. farm organizations that actually argued against mandatory COOL, and that got them into trouble with some of their members.
What my faulty memory was recalling was some of the other national farmer orgs and state farm and pork associations calling for mCOOL. They did that here at the Ex a couple of years ago. The NPPC said it would add extra costs to the system and mess up the North American integrated industry, which it has done. So sorry, NPPC, for saying you were one of the bad guys.
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The NPPC’s now being pretty quiet about mCOOL because they see it as a battle lost, and mCOOl as something that the industry’s going to have to get on and live with. I was just talking with Don Butler, the president of NPPC, and he said mCOOL isn’t an issue to most farmers now, it’s not something they want to talk about, and it’s likely to be the law for the forseeable future.
That’s not good news for Canadian producers. It’s eerie down here how mCOOL, which is such a big deal in Canada, doesn’t get mentioned at all here. It hasn’t come up once at any of the hog markets, hog industry and hog producer sessions I’ve attended, and U.S. farmers I’ve chatted with seem to vaguely recall it as something or other that happened some time ago. Not a big deal to them.
I tried to talk to some officials from state hog organizations that had supported mCOOL, but they didn’t want to talk about it – or rather, they said they didn’t know enough about it. (They tended to be a lot more vocal about it a year or two ago, before it was enshrined.)
So it’s not an issue here and it doesn’t seem likely – unless producer’s here get seriously hurt by it – that there will be much political impetus to getting rid of it.
I’m about to enter a session on whether hispanic labour is a thing of the past for the U.S. hog industry. That’d be good news for Canadians, because cheap Mexican labour is somethign that has allowed U.S. packers to undercut Canadian packers and has forced lower domestic prices down on Canadian producers.
So hog prices might be terrible, COOL might be accepted, but our packers might start getting a little more competitive. And then we’ll see if more money ends up in farmers’ hands.
