“Fixing” a System That Is Not Broken with Restrictions That Do Not Provide More Information for Consumers
Steve Dittmer | AFF Sentinel
Colorado Springs, CO
Originally sent to subscribers 03/12/24
Let’s reflect a bit.
What would be the effects if anti-free trade zealots in certain cattle groups got their way? You know, the ones who have been trying to get mCOOL resurrected at every turn. Besides the fact that the law was ruled illegal by the WTO and threatened to cost the U.S. billions in fines, that is.
The original theory was that fewer feeder cattle, fed cattle and beef from Canada and Mexico would make U.S. feeder cattle prices go up. Adding lean beef to the verboten list would make cull cows and bulls more valuable.
Of course, that ignores the fact that other people can ban imports, too. Canada and Mexico are major customers for our beef production and retaliation is real. Politically speaking trade is a two-way street. Canadian cattlemen are understandably upset about the potential problems for their biggest market. The Mexican administration is already trying to ban U.S. corn over GMO concerns. This slap will not help those negotiations.
American customers are used to using ground beef in burgers, meatloaf, chili and countless other recipes. They would be very upset when the price of ground beef went up by leaps and bounds because of significantly reduced supply. Feeders and their customers would be angry when the drop credit for fed cattle went down because 50/50 trim from Choice and Prime carcasses was worth much less because there was no lean beef coming from trusted suppliers to mix it with.
That’s a bit of what shutting off beef imports and exports would be like. And beef exports utilize 15-20 percent of our production now, compared to five percent years ago.
The price boost the mCOOL proponents were claiming never happened. The big and regional packers either ignored the whole thing as impractical and impossible or concentrated Canadian or Mexican sourced cattle in one plant or on certain days.
The cattle industry mCOOL zealots have not been able to get Congress to resurrect it but they keep trying. They, with consumer activists whose ultimate goal is dramatically reducing or eliminating beef production, have been working on USDA for years, using the angle of consumer transparency as their alleged purpose. The consumer activists want to make it difficult to produce and sell beef. The activists from inside the cattle industry want to force consumers to pay higher prices by cutting supply. They assume there is no limit to how much people will pay, they assume no one will shift to cheaper chicken or pork and assume they will be the ones to survive the ensuing disruptions to a delicate system.
Those are the kinds of forces that have worked on USDA to publish a Final Rule that will force most of our beef supply to lose its “Product of USA” label by 2026. The Final Rule specifies that no beef package can be labeled “Product of the USA,” unless it was born, raised and processed in the U.S. and the packer has auditable records to prove it. They call the label qualifications “voluntary” but the reality is, for the overwhelming majority of the beef supply, it is a disqualification program.
Practically speaking, what USDA is really doing is kowtowing to consumer activists who want to damage or destroy American beef production and cattle industry activists with short-sighted goals of hurting packers, damaging export markets, stopping beef imports (needed lean beef for grinding) and wreaking revenge on mainstream cattle and beef production they feel hasn’t rewarded them properly. Virtually all the beef imported is lean beef we do not produce with half the number of cull cows we had in the ‘70s, for today’s far larger ground beef demand.
It was no accident that USDA Secretary Vilsack announced his new labeling Rule at the National Farmers Union convention. They, along with R-CALF, OCM and others, have favored mCOOL and opposed electronic identification of cattle for years.
Many consumers would not even notice the lack of the label, as was demonstrated by the mCOOL experiment a few years ago. But that assumes the consumer activists will not use the opening to raise questions about the quality and safety of the product without that label. It will still say Choice or Prime and have the USDA inspection mark on it, so the impact will not be catastrophic. But the innuendo could be flown.
Irony #1, the activists and the cattlemen who hate imports and the big packers will not achieve their goal of transparency. Only the small segments of the supply chain that can trace, record and pass audits of origin all the way back to the calf’s birth will gain any leverage, although they might have already extracted from the market what premium they can command. Most of the beef supply will continue on as before with some other kind of label or none (the Rule even forbids an American flag on the label).
But consumers will be getting the same high quality beef they’ve been getting for years, due to the genetics, management and processing the beef production chain has been constantly improving.
The proponents of this label continue to ignore the realities of the beef production chain. The big packers cannot begin to track the origin of every carcass and its approximately 600 pieces of meat through the entire processing system, even if feeders could supply and swear to the origin of the fed animal entering the plant. The industry activists contend the segregation and tracking of meat is a problem the packers made up. No one who had been in one of the big plants and watched the tremendous complexity and speed of the disassembly of carcasses and primals could possibly believe that. Perhaps someday, when DNA sampling or some non-invasive scanning and analysis costs fractions of a penny and all pieces of meat can be matched up with the incoming source carcass by vastly improved computer systems would that be practical. Maybe… about the year 2050 or so.
This is not a car assembled from labeled, stamped or serial numbered inanimate parts and subassemblies within hours. It is far more difficult to track a live animal through multiple owners and geographical locations over several years, much less hundreds of pieces of meat through a disassembly process.
Irony #2, the industry would likely have a modern, proven system of tracking those animals from birth to the incoming chute at the packers, except for the very anti-trade, anti-packer, anti-technology, anti-management types who torpedoed the industry’s efforts to trace and efficiently manage animal husbandry and movement years ago. Even that would only verify the born and raised part of the label.
The activists do not, or pretend not to, understand beef consumers very well. Consumers use several major criteria to decide what beef to buy. They rely on Choice and Prime grades, they rely on their past experience with the retailer or retailers they trust, they may rely on branded beef they know and they rely on price. Other less important factors are package presentation, prep convenience of the cut, prep time and their cooking skill.
Whether or not the “Product of USA” label is affixed is important to only a small segment of consumers, as both consumer research and our past experience during the mCOOL years proved.
As we’ve said many times before, the quality, consistency and palatability of today’s beef supply is the best it has ever been, vastly improved from even a decade ago. We don’t need government regulators fixing what’s not broken. Especially when consumers will not get any new information.
USDA has not published a comment link but they will likely allow a 60-day comment period.
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