Tuna, meat labeling disputes highlight WTO control

The fix, say officials in the pork and beef industries, is to treat foreign-born animals in the same way that the auto industry treats parts produced in other countries. A Ford truck built in Michigan with aluminum wheels made in China, after all, is still considered an American vehicle. A calf born in Mexico but raised and slaughtered in the United States should receive the same U.S. designation, they say. The number of animals potentially covered here is not small; according to USDA data, the United States imported 2.3 million head of cattle in 2010 and 5.7 million head of hogs in the same year.

“It takes our feed, our ranchers and our feed lots to make them worth something,” says Colin Woodall, vice president of government affairs for the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, a trade and marketing group that represents more than 230,000 breeders, producers and feeders. “That beef is a product of the United States, even though the animal is from Mexico.”

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The problem with that approach, says Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, is that because of WTO rules, the U.S. government had to make a small but significant change to the way it determines whether a foreign entity has the proper safety procedures in place to export meat to America.

The equivalency test

Previously, imports were allowed only from foreign plants certified to have food-safety systems that were “at least equal to” those in the United States, based on site visits by U.S. government inspectors. But now, Wallach says, foreign countries can have their regulatory system deemed “equivalent” based only on submitted documents and visits to a few pre-selected sites in the country. Once a nation’s system is found “equivalent,” any facility within its borders can export meat to the United States.

And, Wallach adds, a number of countries were grandfathered as having equivalent systems when the WTO launched in 1995, even if only a select number of their plants had been previously approved as “equal to.”

In the early 2000s, Public Citizen reviewed the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service reports for a number of countries granted equivalent status by the United States and determined that federal officials were “allowing imported meat onto U.S. grocery shelves that does not meet domestic food safety standards,” according to a July 2003 news release.

“The very notion of replacing an import safety standard that required meat and poultry to meet U.S. standards [with] one that allows a very squishy, unclear notion of equivalents,” Wallach says, “means that U.S. consumers have been put at enormous new risk for the benefit of facilitating trade in products that, if not processed properly, can kill your kids.”

At least with COOL, Wallach says, consumers can decide whether they want to buy meat imported from foreign countries. If Mexico, Canada or other country’s animals could gain “Product of the U.S.” labels — after feeding and slaughtering in the States — consumers would be “playing Russian roulette with every burger, steak or chop.”

Pork and beef industry officials disagree vehemently with that position. “If there were an issue, we’d be up in arms about it,” says Nick Giordano, vice president and counsel for international affairs for the National Pork Producers Council. “Our ability to continue to supply the customer . . . is dependent on us supplying a product that is second to none in safety and quality.”

To the meat industry, the COOL system is little more than package-based advertising, one that favors domestic products over foreign ones.

“It’s not any sort of food safety program; it’s just simply a marketing program,” says Woodall of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association. “We don’t think government should be in the marketing of cattle.”