Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack is bowing to calls from farm state lawmakers and livestock producers to enforce a food-labeling mandate that they say the Bush administration allowed meatpackers to circumvent.
Vilsack is preparing to dictate new guidance for implementing the farm law’s country-of-origin labeling provisions, according to farm groups that spoke with him Tuesday.
The secretary told the groups he would write a letter to industry requesting that companies not tag U.S. products with mixed-origin labels. Under rules the Bush administration issued in January, meatpackers could choose to label meat from animals born, raised and slaughtered in the U.S. as “mixed origin” if they were simultaneously packing products using meat from imported animals. [...]
The Bush administration rules issued in mid-January covered muscle cuts and ground beef, lamb, chicken, goat and pork, along with a variety of other commodities. Those regulations take effect in March.
Farm law supporters in Congress complained those rules would give meatpackers wiggle room to group U.S. products with mixed-origin products and mark both with “multiple country” labels.
“These loopholes essentially allow processors to label every product — including exclusively U.S. products and entirely foreign products — under the multiple country category,” Sen. Byron L. Dorgan , D-N.D., and six other Senate Democrats told Vilsack in a Feb. 3 letter. “If we are just creating a system to label all products as multiple country origin, there is no value in [country of origin labeling] and no benefit to the consumer.”
Since the Bush administration rule is discretionary — meatpackers have the option of choosing to label their products as mixed origin — new rulemaking will not be required if Vilsack’s guidance is followed.
Vilsack told the producer groups, which included R-CALF USA, the National Farmers Union and the American Farm Bureau Federation, that if businesses do not comply with congressional intent, he will be forced to rewrite the rules, dragging out an already delayed process.
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