Agriculture Secretary to Issue New Meat Labeling Guidelines
By Aliya Sternstein, CQ Staff
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack is bowing to calls from farm state lawmakers and livestock producers to enforce a food-labeling mandate that they say the Bush administration allowed meatpackers to circumvent.
The Agriculture Department planned to send a letter Friday afternoon to meatpackers offering new guidelines for complying with the farm law’s country-of-origin labeling provisions to processors Friday afternoon, a department spokesman said.
The secretary told farm groups earlier in the week that he would ask companies not to tag U.S. products with mixed-origin labels. Under rules the Bush administration issued in January, meatpackers could choose to label meat from animals born, raised and slaughtered in the U.S. as “mixed origin” if they were simultaneously packing products using meat from imported animals.
Critics, including the domestic livestock producers and consumer advocates that pressed for the law, said the rules give meatpackers a way to evade congressional intent. The labeling requirement, first mandated by the 2002 farm law (PL 107-171) and expanded in the 2008 law (PL 110-246), requires that meat from animals born, raised and slaughtered stateside bear a “Product of the U.S.” label that grocery shoppers can see.
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http://www.cqpolitics.com/wmspage.cfm?docid=news-000003057598
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