Of-Origin Labels on Meat
10:30 am
July 3, 2012
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by Dan Charles
Do you know where your beef comes from?
Enlarge JelleS/Flickr.com
Do you know where your beef comes from?
If you want to know where your meat came from, you won't be happy with the World Trade Organization right now. Late last week, the WTO announced that the United States' country-of-origin labels, which took effect in 2008, discriminate unfairly against foreign meat suppliers such as Mexico and Canada.
Some consumer groups were outraged by the WTO's decision; the beef industry, not so much. The ruling could mean that the U.S. will have to abandon those labels, but hang on, maybe not. In the world of international trade, the wheels of justice turn very slowly indeed. Years are likely to pass before you'll see any change in those food labels, as U.S. officials figure out a way to comply with the WTO ruling.
In fact, officials at the Office of the US Trade Representative are holding out hope that the labels will survive. They point out that the WTO didn't object to the labels themselves, but rather the system for implementing them.
Here's the difficulty with that system. Unlike, say, corn fields, animals tend to move around, so it's a little more difficult to say where they came from.
Take the case of beef cattle that were born in Mexico, but arrived in the U.S. as calves and grew to adulthood here, says Colin Woodall, from the National Cattlemen's Beef Association. Under the U.S. labeling system, meat from those animals is labeled as coming from the U.S. and also from Mexico. To make sure the right label goes on that meat, a meat packer typically will keep those animals separate from the much larger number of U.S.-origin animals, which costs time and money.
This process results in greater expense (keeping the animals separated and properly recorded), so slaughterhouses pay less for the smaller number of foreign sourced cattle.
One alternative is making the label voluntary, but some argue that would lead to selective use. Another is to use the slaughterhouse as the label point.
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