Agricultural News
R-CALF USA Touts COOL as Possible Food Safety Tool
Wed, 10 Oct 2012 16:51:15 CDT
In its unsuccessful defense of the United States' mandatory country of origin labeling (COOL) law before the World Trade Organization (WTO), the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) did not mention the possible food safety benefits of COOL.
According to the international WTO panel that ruled against U.S. COOL in June, "The United States did not assert that it seeks to provide consumers with information . . . for the protection of human health and safety. . ."
In other words," said R-CALF USA CEO Bill Bullard, "The U.S. failed to raise the most obvious and compelling defense to our domestic COOL law, but now the importation of millions of pounds of adulterated meat from Canada provides U.S. citizens with a clear and convincing example of how they can rely on COOL to protect themselves from tainted imported products, even when their government fails to ensure the safety of foreign products entering the United States."
The COOL law went into effect in early 2009 and informs U.S. citizens about the origins of food with a label affixed to such food products as beef, pork, lamb, chicken, fruits and vegetables and some nuts.
Beginning on September 20 and continuing through October 5, the United States agency in charge of food safety for beef, pork and chicken, the U.S. Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS), issued public health alerts regarding imported Canadian beef that includes 1.1 million pounds of trim and approximately 1.4 million pounds of primal and sub-primal cuts used to produce steaks, roasts, mechanically tenderized steaks and roasts, and ground beef, all of which were produced by the Canadian firm, XL Foods, Inc.
FSIS warned U.S. citizens that these Canadian products might be tainted and should be returned to the place of purchase or destroyed. The products were believed to be distributed to 339 retail food outlets nationwide.
Ten cases of illness from the imported products were reported as of Oct. 8, according to the Meatingplace news service. The FSIS said the products had been found to contain E. coli bacteria.
The Canadian Food Inspection Agency reported that packing plant that produced the beef had not fully implemented nor updated its food safety program.
"It is abundantly clear that both Canada's and the United States' food safety agencies failed miserably to protect citizens from tainted Canadian imports," said Bullard.
"COOL, however, empowers U.S. citizens to achieve food safety for themselves by giving them the tool needed to immediately identify the origin of their food purchases and to simply avoid products from countries where adulterated food is produced," Bullard commented.
"COOL is the most effective and efficient means for U.S. citizens to protect themselves from tainted imported products - all they have to do is look at the labels. This is a far more efficient and effective means of avoiding recalled product than to have to wade through FSIS' list of 339 establishments to determine if they may have purchased tainted products," he added.
R-CALF USA is circulating a petition until October 31, 2012, to help demonstrate U.S. citizen support for COOL. The petition directs the President of the United States, the USTR and USDA to "enforce the Country of Origin Labeling Act (COOL) and to disregard 'rulings' of the World Trade Organization finding that COOL is a technical barrier to trade."
"We already have nearly a thousand signatures and we hope to get many thousands more by October 31," Bullard said.
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