Critics are continuing to noodle Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue’s plan to reorganize his large department, finding things they don’t like about it. Perdue’s desire to move U.S. involvement in world food standards to USDA’s trade office, taking it away from food safety, was the first change to…
Hundreds of ranchers from as many as 20 states will descend on Rapid City, SD, next week for the Ranchers-Cattlemen Action Legal Fund annual convention. R-CALF, as it’s called, has made a lot of promises on the meeting agenda.
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A petition calling upon the United States to ban Brazilian beef is looking for 100,000 signatures on the White House’s We the People website.
“This petition is important because American produced beef is not differentiated from Brazilian imported beef at supermarkets in the United States,” says the sponsor statement. “Brazil is under investigation for exporting…
As individual actions, they might not mean much. Collectively, they say Country-of-Origin Labeling (COOL) is not going away anytime soon.
Two states known for their cowboys, Wyoming and South Dakota, have seen early introduction of COOL bills in their legislatures, respectively, in Cheyenne and Pierre. Cattlemen headquartered in neighboring Montana have not given up on…
As a surrogate speaker this past August for then-candidate Donald J. Trump, former Ohio Republican Congressman Bob McEwen gave a fiery speech to a gathering of independent activist cattlemen from 18 states gathered at the Little America Hotel in Cheyenne, WY.
He passionately argued for property rights and small business, picking up bursts of applause…
Late Tuesday night, the House of Representatives released a $1.1-trillion spending bill to fund the federal government through the end of the fiscal year, which is Sept. 30, 2016. Lobbyists for full funding of the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) were pleased with the numbers. The Food and Drug Administration will receive a total of…
The World Trade Organization (WTO) has authorized Canada and Mexico to charge the U.S. $1 billion in retaliatory tariffs for country-of-origin labeling (COOL) on meat. Last spring, WTO rejected a U.S. appeal of its decision that COOL unfairly discriminates against meat imports and gives the advantage to domestic meat products. COOL, which went into effect…
Last week, the United States Trade Representative (USTR) filed a legal brief in the World Trade Organization (WTO) dispute over mandatory country-of-origin labeling (COOL), arguing that the $3 billion sought by Canada and Mexico in retaliatory tariffs are a dramatic overestimation of damages. The U.S. requested that the WTO Arbitrator reject the amounts requested by…
Country-of-origin labeling (COOL) does not provide much in the way of “measurable economic benefits” for American consumers and costs producers, packers, and retailers in the United States $2.6 billion a year for all covered commodities, USDA’s chief economist stated in a 198-page report sent Friday to Congress. The report was mandated by the 2014 Farm…
