If you breathed a sigh of relief that USDA did not vow to break up the big packers, destroy our value-added beef quality successes or open the field for trial attorneys to wage a tobacco, tire or Roundup-style jihad on the beef industry, I hope you enjoyed the brief respite. The most recent news is mixed, with some directly hobbling the beef industry.
Letitia James, the infamous New York attorney general who has been persecuting former President Donald Trump to raise millions for New York government, has announced her newest fundraising persecution target will be JBS. She apparently doesn’t like the company’s claims regarding net zero emissions by 2040 and quotes United Nation’s “Livestock’s Long Shadow” faulty data.
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which has traded its assigned job of regulating securities trading for woke policy objectives, did back off part of its three-stage climate change advocacy crusade. It retreated from Stage 3 reporting, which would have required farmers and ranchers to account for all the greenhouse gas emissions they were responsible for, and report to publicly traded companies they supply. Reportables included things like tires used, fuel consumed, miles traveled, methane from ruminating cows and heaven knows what else.
Stages 1 and 2 remain in place, meaning all other businesses in our supply chain, in fact nearly every business in the economy, will still have to spend millions to a) comply and/or b) hire lawyers or join lawsuits trying to stop yet another government attempt to run the world.
The Environmental Protection Agency has already proposed to tighten wastewater rules that would force all packers to spend millions in compliance and force smaller packers to shut down, unable to bear the cost.
It is typical of the big government/socialist efforts that one wing requires some mandates in direct cross purposes with another wing, all striving for more power and control. The same Biden administration that is granting millions of taxpayer dollars to finance smaller and regional packers, especially ones that don’t exist yet, is on the other side of the fence, trying to impose wastewater regulations that would put existing smaller operations out of business.
Irony? Or just stupidity?
The same folks who decry concentration in industries, hate big business—President Joe Biden felt compelled to claim he was a “capitalist” and “not anti-corporation” in his State of the Union presidential campaign speech—fail to understand that every regulation and restriction they place on businesses in an industry forces more concentration, higher prices for consumers and steals funds for innovation. The big businesses the regulators hate are the ones that can manage to comply while smaller ones cannot.
The latest salvo: USDA announced a final rule that would essentially force most beef sold at retail to no longer be labeled “Product of USA.” Use of the label is “voluntary” but most all the beef processed—the high-quality, safely processed beef consumers depend on and pay for—could no longer bear such a label. And putting an American flag on the package without the verbiage is prohibited, too.
USDA claims they are doing this in the name of “transparency.” Practically speaking, what they are really doing is kowtowing to consumer activists who want to damage or destroy American beef production and industry activists with short-sighted goals of hurting packers, damaging export markets, stopping beef imports (needed lean beef for grinding) and wreaking revenge on mainstream cattle and beef production.
We’ve really been down this road before. The awful mandatory county-of-original labeling (MCOOL) experiment proved the surveys were accurate—origin was not among the top half dozen factors consumers considered in buying beef. Most consumers did not notice the label change and continued relying on the branded beef and/or retail reputation, appearance, past tasting and cooking experience and price, just like before.
And the price boosts the MCOOL proponents were claiming never happened. The big and regional packers either ignored the whole thing or concentrated Canadian- or Mexican-sourced cattle in one plant or on certain days.
The skeptics claiming beef package segregation was a packer myth have never explained how to track the nearly 600 or so pieces of meat from each carcass through a plant and have stymied all electronic tracking of cattle to enable a practical U.S. “born, raised and processed” label.
We operate in a world wherein businesses that produce things, employ people and supply consumers constantly have to sue their government—individually or as associations—to keep the government regulations from putting them out of business. — Steve Dittmer, WLJ columnist
(Steve Dittmer is the author of the Agribusiness Freedom Foundation newsletter. Views in the column do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of WLJ or its editorial staff.)
