Cattle Producers Request COOL Meeting with AMI
US - R-CALF USA yesterday responded to a June 15, 2007, letter from American Meat Institute (AMI) President and CEO J. Patrick Boyle to request a meeting with AMI.
19 June 2007
4 minute read
If AMI genuinely “desires to assist its meatpacking members in seeking an effective, efficient and accurate means of verifying the country of origin of live cattle, without the burden of additional paperwork and with the benefit of minimizing errors.”
“AMI recently recommended that its meatpacker members start to ‘demand’ that U.S. cattle producers provide affidavits, access to records, third-party verifications, and indemnification of packer liability in an effort to comply with the 2002 country-of-origin labeling (COOL) law, and R-CALF is requesting that AMI rescind that notice at once,” said R-CALF USA CEO Bill Bullard.
Interestingly, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) – also on June 15, 2007 – announced a new 60-day public comment period on the 2002 COOL law.
"If AMI professes to know what requirements the Secretary intends to impose on industry participants to implement the COOL law, then AMI must have been involved in unlawful, ex parte communications with the Secretary in order to obtain such knowledge,""
R-CALF USA CEO Bill Bullard.
“If Congress intended for AMI to second-guess or otherwise preempt the lawful establishment of requirements to be imposed on all market participants in order to properly implement the COOL law, it would have stated so – but it did not,” Bullard noted. “Instead, Congress expressly directed, and exclusively authorized, only the Agriculture Secretary to issue such regulations.”
“If AMI professes to know what requirements the Secretary intends to impose on industry participants to implement the COOL law, then AMI must have been involved in unlawful, ex parte communications with the Secretary in order to obtain such knowledge,” R-CALF USA’s letter states. “If this is the case, then the Secretary’s action…to reopen the public comment period…is a shell game, inasmuch as the outcome of the rulemaking process is already known by AMI before the agency even considers public comments.”
R-CALF USA’s letter also informed AMI that a recent Idaho District Court decision invalidated proposed Bureau of Land Management (BLM) grazing regulations on the basis that the court believed the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (NCBA) wrote the rules instead of the BLM.
“If AMI, which at this point professes to already know the requirements of the yet unpublished final COOL rules, likewise has written the regulations to implement COOL, our two organizations, along with the Secretary, may be involved in a protracted dispute,” R-CALF USA’s letter continues. “…If AMI does not know the (COOL) requirements the Secretary will impose…, then AMI has no legal or economic justification for its action of recommending that its meatpacker members demand that U.S. farmers and ranchers begin relinquishing their rights, incurring additional production costs, and otherwise begin comporting to meatpacker demands made under the false pretense that such demands are necessary to comply with the 2002 COOL law…”
R-CALF USA advised AMI that its recommendations to its meatpacker members constitute an effort to preemptively influence market rules without any legal or economic justification and further raises the question of explicit collusion, where packers would be colluding to fix the rules of the market for the purpose of seeking an unfair advantage over independent cattle producers.
R-CALF USA again reminded AMI that it would file a complaint with the Grain Inspection Packers and Stockyards Administration (GIPSA) against any meatpacker that follows AMI’s recommendations of June 13, 2007. R-CALF USA views AMI’s recommendations to be a direct violation of the Packers and Stockyards Act, which prohibits meatpackers from engaging in unfair, unjustly discriminatory and deceptive trade practices.
To avoid such a complaint, R-CALF USA proposed that the two groups meet to discuss how best to verify the origins of cattle. “The U.S. beef industry would be best served if the cattle and beef segments were to agree on a simplified approach to COOL implementation. . . Such an effort would be far more productive than pursuing the present course that will most certainly lead our respective industry segments into a protracted dispute,” the letter concluded.
To view AMI’s June 15, 2007, letter to R-CALF USA, or to view today’s letter from R-CALF USA to AMI, visit the “Country-of-Origin Labeling” link at www.r-calfusa.com.
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