Politics and Money to Blame for Killing Consumer-Friendly Food Labeling Program.

Note:
The only silver lining is that the Larry Craig provision to exempt
factory farms from Superfund and Emergency Planning and Community Right
to Know Act (EPCRA) failed once again.


Statement of Wenonah Hauter, Director of Public Citizen’s Food Program.



The long
battle over country-of-origin labeling (COOL) has reached a
disappointing finish, with a decision last night by the House-Senate
Conference Committee on the agriculture appropriations bill (H.R. 2744)
to wave a white flag of surrender to the food and grocery industries.
The committee effectively killed a mandatory program that would require
labels on foods sold in grocery stores to state where and how the food
was raised or produced.



As is
typical of this Congress, this final move was made behind closed doors.
Even though Public Citizen tried to attend this so-called public
meeting, no one who was standing in line to attend the meeting was
allowed to enter the room. Despite polls showing that consumers
overwhelmingly support mandatory labeling, lawmakers have killed the
idea through budgetary gimmicks because they favor a weaker, voluntary
labeling program. A mandatory program would not have cost the
government any money; that cost would have been borne by the food
industry.



As outlined in the recent Public Citizen report Tabled Labels, available at http://www.citizen.org/documents/COOL.pdf,
big agribusiness used millions of dollars in lobbying expenditures and
campaign contributions, and a network of Washington insiders with close
connections to the Bush administration and Congress, to thwart COOL.
This latest effort to kill COOL was led by U.S. Rep. Henry Bonilla
(R-Texas), who has received more than $167,000 from COOL opponents in
the past three election cycles, making him their top beneficiary. The
Food Marketing Institute, which represents the grocery industry, and
the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, which represents the meat
industry, have been the biggest opponents of mandatory COOL. It is
apparent that our elected lawmakers’ main concern is to protect
industry, not consumers.



While
the appropriations bill delays mandatory COOL for meat to September
2008, this move effectively kills the program because this new
implementation date is beyond the expiration date – 2007 – of the 2002
Farm Bill that originally mandated it.



Rules
for voluntary COOL are already in effect, yet most consumers are not
getting information about where their food was produced. For nearly
four years, Congress has stalled on this issue. Most people can earn a
college degree in four years, but apparently it’s not enough time for
Congress to institute a simple program that would have been useful to
every consumer in the United States. Congress has failed us again.



Public
Citizen is a national, nonprofit consumer advocacy organization based
in Washington, D.C. For more information, please visit www.citizen.org.