[Jacob-list] News Items

[Neal and Louise Grose]

The following news items are culled from agricultural news services and relate to general sheep topics. These have largely fallen beneath the radar of the general public. They are not intended as political commentary, though they could be taken that way. If this offends anyone, then I apologize and will not send these things in the future.

COOL legislation.
Country Of Origin Labeling was passed in 2002 by Congress and turned over to the USDA to developed into rules. The Beef people and other commodity groups thought that it would look good in the grocery stores. You might have walked through the BI-LO and seen Asparagus from Chile, green onions from Mexico, ground beef from Venezuela and prime rib from Kansas. What the USDA lawyers came up with was a system that REQUIRED the documentation and tracking of all commodities to prove that this was indeed be the case. Tagging of all animals would be implemented. Large feedlots would have been forced to maintain records of animal movement. This would not have been much more work than is currently being done with the Scrapie Programs. We dairy farmers already do this, for the most part, and thought it was a grand idea from the standpoint of tracking and restricting cattle movement and insuring health concerns. However, we are second fiddle in all regards to the beef farmers in these concerns.

Fast forward to the current legislative session. The NCA has changed their mind. The budget legislation was different in the House and Senate and went to the Conference Committee. At the urging of the Bush Administration, Conference Committee members inserted several provisions in the omnibus spending bill which were not part of either version passed by the House or the Senate. Among these was a provision delaying implementation of COOL and effectively killing it.  Much posturing by everyone ensued. The deciding factor on whether the Conference Committee language was passed was backing by the NCA and other "Large" farm commodity groups. (Small farm groups have generally supported implementation of COOL) All this happened during Christmas break while much of the rest of the country was occupied by BSE and the Democratic presidential candidates. COOL implementation would have had the side effect of easing some of the concerns brought up by BSE.

Easing of Trade Restrictions with Australia.
The Bush Administration has quietly and quickly pushed forward on Free Trade agreements with Australia. Signing of agreements is expected by the end of January that would open trade on agriculture goods. This is largely seen as a gift to Australia in gratitude for support for the War in Iraq. It is the opinion of many in the dairy industry that this would cause significant downward movement in wholesale dairy prices. I imagine it would be bad for lamb prices as well. 

Neal Grose

 North Carolina
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.pairlist.net/pipermail/jacob-list/attachments/20040125/fcb26415/attachment.html