The National Pork Producers Council is urging the U.S. Senate to take action, before the August recess, to pass an improved version of the act that makes mandatory the reporting by American packers of livestock purchases and prices.
Under the livestock reporting act of 1999, that took effect in 2001, purchasers of hogs, cattle and sheep are required to report to the U.S. Department of Agriculture purchases made and prices paid.
The act, which is designed to reflect what’s happening in the industry and bring fairness to the market, must be reauthorized every five years.
National Pork Producers Council CEO Neil Dierks says allowing the law to expire would be highly disruptive.
The process right now, it is a bill that has three improvements for the pork industry side, has passed the U.S. House Committee on Agriculture and we would expect in the near future that our House of Representatives will approve by the full house.
It’s really a non controversial bill.
We’ve been talking to the industry for over two years on the improvements, the buyers, the sellers, but anyway the whole idea is how do we improve things.
On the U.S. Senate side there was a briefing done of some staff during May.
There’s no specific date set for a hearing but we hope the Ag Committee in the Senate will take action on it and we hope the whole thing will be renewed by the August recess.
The reason for that is the law must be renewed by September 30 of this year otherwise it will expire, and we won’t have price reporting potentially or we’re going to have to do something else very rapidly and those aren’t good solutions so we want to get it renewed.
Dierks recalls when the government shut down in October 2013 we went 17 days when there was no price reporting and that was very disruptive.
He notes, because Canadian hog prices are based on U.S. prices, the implications of losing mandatory price reporting extend beyond the U.S. border.
