The National Pork Producers Council is calling for quick action to fix Mandatory Country of Origin Labelling to avoid the threat of retaliatory tariffs.
On Monday the World Trade Organization rejected the final appeal of the United States of a series of rulings that found Mandatory Country of Origin Labelling discriminates against imported livestock in violation of U.S. international trade obligations.
Dave Warner, the director of communications with the National Pork Producers Council, says that final ruling paves the way for Canada and Mexico to impose retaliatory tariffs on a host of U.S. products.
Certainly beef and pork will be on those lists but there could be all kinds of other agricultural products as well as non agricultural products on the retaliation list and tariffs are a tax.
That’s a tax on U.S. products going into Canada and Mexico and Canada and Mexico are our number 2 and our number 3 export markets for all kinds of goods so we can’t have our products going in there at non competitive rates.
That means lost jobs in this country and our economy suffering.
We can’t have that.
We need to avoid retaliation and that’s why NPPC is urging Congress to act right now to repeal those offending parts of the Country of Origin Labelling law, so essentially the labelling provisions for beef, pork and poultry, to eliminate those and get us compliant with WTO rules and avoid this retaliation which would be very harmful to the U.S. economy.
Warner expects Canada and Mexico to, within days, ask the WTO for authorization to retaliate.
He says the critical thing is that it takes time for both the House and the Senate to pass legislation so we need them to start right now and get something done before they take their August recess because those tariffs could come into effect before that recess ends.
