The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations are working to help improve the food safety system in Belarus.
Governmental representatives met for five days of talks in Minsk earlier this month to conclude a previous project and set priorities for future work. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is attempting to understand the…
Country of origin labeling for meat once involved lofty policy debates in Congress and international bodies like the World Trade Organization.
Now two influential groups have decided it would help domestic producers and consumers alike if USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) would change its policies. The Lincoln, NE-based Organization for Competitive Markets and…
The European Union is punishing Brazil for alleged deficiencies in the country’s control system by banning imports from 12 BRF S.A. poultry plants.
Brazil is the world’s second-largest poultry producer, and its Agriculture Minister Blairo Maggi promises to take the EU to the World Trade Organization’s (WTO’s) Dispute Settlement Body. He says the EU is…
Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue, for the moment, has backed off his controversial plan to transfer the U.S. Codex Office, which works on international food standards, from USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service to a new trade office in the department.
In a letter to Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, R-KS, Perdue said there…
In public policy, as in life, learning from past mistakes is a cardinal rule for success. That is why it was disappointing to see Thomas Gremillion from the Consumer Federation of America advocate for the reinstatement of mandatory country-of-origin labelling (MCOOL) for beef and pork in a recent guest opinion column on the Food Safety …
This week marks the beginning of formal talks to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement, an agreement President Donald Trump has called the “worst deal in history.” To make it a better deal, his Administration released a set of negotiating objectives last month, but they ignored the most outrageous example of how American consumers…
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…
U.S. dairy organizations and the state departments of agriculture across the country turned to President-elect Donald Trump Wednesday to combat Canada’s existing and soon-to-be-expanded protectionist policies designed to block imports from the United States.
They say the policies are in direct violation of Canada’s trade commitments under the North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA) and…
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…
Long-awaited U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) catfish inspections, mandated by Farm Bills since 2008, will begin next March, according to a final rule establishing an inspection program for fish in the order Siluriformes, including catfish. The final rule, which applies to both domestically raised and imported Siluriformes fish, was developed by USDA’s Food Safety…
