Agricultural News
R-CALF USA Applauds U.S. Appeal of WTO's Adverse COOL Ruling
Fri, 23 Mar 2012 14:56:47 CDT
The United States has decided to appeal a World Trade Organization ruling against a domestic law requiring country-of-origin-labeling. The law requires grocers to inform consumers where their meats, fruits, vegetables, and certain other foods were grown. R-CALF USA applauded the decision to appeal the ruling. Here is R-CALF's position on the appeal:
"We're extremely thankful that our U.S. Trade Representative has chosen to defend our constitutionally-passed COOL law," said R-CALF USA Region VI Director and COOL Committee Chair Mike Schultz adding, "But, we're in a no-win situation regarding this frontal attack on our COOL law because our nation should not tolerate for an instant a foreign entity's efforts to undermine our constitutionally-passed domestic laws in the first place." Schultz explained that it is a sad state of affairs when our U.S. government kowtows to a One-World Government tribunal by playing within that foreign tribunal's pseudo judicial process.
"Several powerful corporate industry groups are actually supporting the WTO's efforts to undermine our U.S. COOL law, including the National Cattlemen's Beef Association (NCBA) and the American Meat Institute (AMI)," said R-CALF USA CEO Bill Bullard adding, "These groups don't want U.S. consumers to know if they are buying beef produced exclusively in the United States or if their beef was produced in Nicaragua, Honduras, Mexico, or any one of the more than a dozen countries where U.S. corporations source their beef."
Bullard said those corporate industry groups that support the WTO's anti-COOL ruling do not want U.S. consumers to support U.S. farmers and ranchers by choosing to buy U.S. beef for their families.
Bullard added that other groups have tried to sugar-coat the WTO's anti-COOL ruling by claiming the ruling reinforced the United States' right to implement a COOL program and only attacked the manner by which the United States' COOL law was implemented.
"This is nothing more than semantics and the WTO is far too coy to have attacked our domestic law in any other way than it did. The fact is that the WTO accomplished its objective by ruling on the one hand that COOL was too rigid and treated foreign product less favorably than domestic product, but on the other hand, it ruled that COOL was too flexible and therefore nullified the COOL law's objective."
"The WTO's anti-COOL ruling is nonsensical and baseless and we are confident the United States will prevail in this unenviable appeal," concluded Schultz.
WebReadyTM Powered by WireReady® NSI
Top Agricultural News
More Headlines...