Why is the Obama administration siding with meat packers over the rights of U.S. consumers . . .
. . . to know the country of origin of the meats they buy? And why on earth would President Obamas Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, in the event of a conflict between the interests of the meat packing industry and the interests of consumers,.allow an unelected international body be the final arbiter of such a conflict?
Doesn't it just warm the cockles of your heart to know that your President and his team are working so hard to protect you from such dangerous knowledge? 
And why should American consumers not be free to favor (or not) the products of any country they wish?
I'm not sure why the article refers to Vilsack as "then-Secretary of Agriculture." He is still serving in the post.
(This post refers to this thread, and to this article, excerpted below):
This week, the World Trade Organization (WTO) finally issued a decision in the challenge made by Mexico and Canada to the U.S.’s country-of-origin (COOL) labeling rules for meat. And environmental and food safety groups are hopping mad, as WTO upheld the contention made by those countries, supported by multi0national meat packers, that the rules unfairly impede global trade.
“The meatpacking lobby has lost the COOL debate from the court of public opinion to the Court of Appeals to the halls of Congress so they are taking their complaint to the faceless unelected bureaucrats in Geneva,” said Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch. “When the meat cannot get its way here in America, it is trying to use the WTO to overturn the will of the American people.”
The current U.S. rules, which went into effect in 2013, require that meat sold in groceries be labeled to show separately where the animal was born, raised and slaughtered. The WTO’s ruling agrees that those regulations unfairly discriminate against imported meat to give an unfair edge to domestic products. In the ongoing dispute, then-Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack suggested last November that WTO should resolve the dispute and that the U.S. would abide by what the WTO decided.
Meat packers insists that the labeling rules have cost them profits, and the Canadian government threatened to put a tariff on U.S. meats and other food products imported from the U.S. The North American Meat Association and the American Meat Institute hailed the decision. But Food & Water Watch said that consumers deserved to know where their meat came from.
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