WTO Says U.S. Consumers Don’t Need to Know Where Meat Comes From

Multinational meatpackers say that labeling raises cost and that Americans do not need to know the origin of meat; World Trade Organization says labeling gives an unfair advantage to domestic meat. Shouldn’t Americans decide for themselves?

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This week, the World Trade Organization (WTO) finally issued a decision in the challenge made by Mexico and Canada to the U.S.’s country-of-origin (COOL) labeling rules for meat. And environmental and food safety groups are hopping mad, as WTO upheld the contention made by those countries, supported by multi-national meat packers, that the rules unfairly impede global trade.

“The meatpacking lobby has lost the COOL debate from the court of public opinion to the Court of Appeals to the halls of Congress so they are taking their complaint to the faceless unelected bureaucrats in Geneva,” said Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch. “When the meat cannot get its way here in America, it is trying to use the WTO to overturn the will of the American people.”

The current U.S. rules, which went into effect in 2013, require that meat sold in groceries be labeled to show separately where the animal was born, raised and slaughtered. The WTO’s ruling agrees that those regulations unfairly discriminate against imported meat to give an unfair edge to domestic products. In the ongoing dispute, then-Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack suggested last November that WTO should resolve the dispute and that the U.S. would abide by what the WTO decided.

At a telephone press conference yesterday, Roger Johnson, president of the National Farmers Union, and Danni Beer, president of the U.S. Cattlemen’s Association, joined Food & Water Watch’s Patrick Goodall and Lori Wallach from Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, emphasizing the divide between meat producers and multinational meat packers who may blend meat from different countries, the latter claiming—much as opponents of GMO labeling do—that providing information to consumers is an onerous, unsustainable expense.

But Food & Water Watch said that consumers deserved to know where their meat came from.

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http://www.nationofchange.org/2014/10/26/wto-says-u-s-consumers-dont-need-know-meat-comes/