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Expanded M-COOL

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Anonymous

Guest
COOL bill for processed foods to be introduced



(MEATPOULTRY.com, September 28, 2007)

by Keith Nunes



CLEVELAND ― Next week, Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio intends to introduce legislation requiring country-of-origin labeling (COOL) for processed foods, according to the Ohio Farm Bureau Federation (O.F.B.F.).


"From food to toothpaste, toys to tires, we must do more to protect our families from contaminated and defective imports," Mr. Brown said. "We need a new approach to import safety. We need to inform and protect consumers, while holding distributors accountable for the safety of the products they import."



The O.F.B.F. said Mr. Brown will introduce legislation that makes labeling more transparent and uniform for manufactured foods. The bill would make COOL mandatory for processed foods. This would be an expansion of provisions in the 2002 farm bill that established country-of-origin labeling for meat, fruits, vegetables and seafood. After repeated statutory and regulatory delays, the new labeling requirements are scheduled to go into effect in September of 2008.


The Food and Product Responsibility Act of 2007, introduced Sept. 20, would require distributors of food and consumer products demonstrate the financial capacity to cover risks associated with recalls and product safety. In addition, Brown’s Bill would grant the Secretary of Agriculture the authority to require recalls of meat, poultry, and egg products and grant the Food and Drug Administration the authority to require recalls for the products it regulates.


meatpoultry.com
 

PORKER

Well-known member
US food import safety battle continues

By Charlotte Eyre

Source of Article: http://www.foodproductiondaily-usa.com/news/ng.asp?n=80153-us-department-of-agriculture-food-and-product-responsibility-act-listeria

9/27/2007 - Debates over how the US should deal with food safety issues continue to rage between regulators, manufacturers, consumers and even the media, after a number of scandals this year broke out over imported products from Asia.

The value of goods imported by the US has doubled since 2000, to reach an estimated $2.2tn this year, highlighting the need for more stringent safety checks to be put in place. What's more, the value of goods from China, which is the second-largest exporter to the US after Canada, is expected to reach $341bn this year, up almost 25 percent from last year.


US gives millions for food safety research
The US Department of Agriculture will donate more than $14m to research projects, focused on improving food safety, across the country, acting Agriculture Secretary Chuck Conner announced Tuesday.

"USDA places a high importance on ensuring Americans have access to a safe food supply," Conner said. "These research projects will address food safety issues across a broad range of topics that include shipping, storage, food buying, food preparation and food consumption."

The grants will fund research that will help reduce the incidence of food-borne illnesses among children, he added.

Bill calls for distributors to cover recall costs
The distributors of certain food imports will have to prove that they have the financial means to cover any recalls or product safety fines, if a new bill is passed.

Under the Food and Product Responsibility Act, a manufacturer would have to obtain certification to prove that it was financially secure for a period of two years, and could also cover any costs relating to lawsuits or compensatory damages.

According to BusinessInsurance.com, the act could help reduce the number of manufacturers dealing in faulty goods, thereby reducing health problems associated with food products.

Senator Bob Casey, who is proposing the bill, said that he was particularly concerned about meat and eggs, and any related products, as they often harbour the pathogens that lead to food-borne diseases such as listeria.

Import safety regulations not tough enough?
Despite an apparent concerted crackdown on import safety regulations, ex FDA officials have accused the regulatory body of ignoring proposals for improvement, Reuters reported yesterday.

"FDA has failed to implement literally hundreds of proposed solutions to specific import problems, which would have enabled the FDA to begin to focus its resources where the risks are indeed the greatest," Benjamin England, a former FDA official said.

According to England, FDA lacks import data, such as information on where the product was made and what process was used during manufacturing.

Representative Rosa DeLauro, a Connecticut Democrat, told the news agency that the FDA was "frivolous" with manufacturers' import safety suggestions.

"The FDA lacks a formal process that evaluates the food safety systems of other countries," she added.
 

PORKER

Well-known member
"Based on our findings, we are considering a number of actions to strengthen our enforcement and investigation capabilities and to foster better quality management practices."


Debates over how the US should deal with food safety issues continue to rage between regulators, manufacturers, consumers and even the media, after a number of scandals this year broke out.

They better get started!
 

PORKER

Well-known member
COOL Compromise by Grocery retailers Leadership But Battle Scars Remain

Jim Prevor's Perishable Pundit, 2007

Country-of-origin labeling has long been a contentious issue in the produce trade. We still remember the phone call from a key retailer after the Pundit wrote a cover story in PRODUCE BUSINESS called Nothing Cool About It in which the retailer said he thought the issue was lost after the law passed in the dark of night in 2002 but that our piece motivated him to lead a fight against COOL — a fight that culminated in a delay of over half a decade and a new agreement on a much improved bill:

Industry Negotiates Key Improvements to COOL
in U.S. House Farm Bill Country of Origin Labeling
to Go Into Effect September 30, 2008

As part of the 2007 Farm Bill to be considered by the U.S. House of Representatives tomorrow, the produce, meat and retail industries have negotiated important improvements to reduce the regulatory burden and cost of the country-of-origin law now on the books.

United Fresh and PMA have worked together for the past several years with a coalition of produce associations and the retail supermarket industry to find common ground that would deliver country-of-origin information to consumers, without the burden of the law first passed in 2002.

Implementation of that law had been delayed twice by Congress based on industry concerns about its unintended consequences and cost. In September 2006, these organizations reached a compromise agreement that we have advanced with Members of Congress.

Since that time, the environment to consider country-of-origin labeling has changed significantly, fueled by recent food safety issues such as the Chinese import situation. Many key members of Congress have made known that they would not allow further delay in the 2002 law, and instead urged all parties to negotiate any improvements that they felt needed in the law. Their bottom line was that mandatory COOL for meat and produce would go into effect on September 30, 2008, but they were willing to consider improvements in the law if consumer groups, meat and produce suppliers, and retailers could agree.

With the oversight of the House Agriculture Committee, representatives of the meat, produce, and retail industries have negotiated over the past week a series of compromises with consumer and farm groups. Yesterday, a number of produce stakeholder organizations reviewed the proposed changes to the law and endorsed an agreement to move forward with mandatory COOL with the following changes that will be included in the Farm Bill:

Significantly reduced penalties for mistakes in labeling at point of purchase, including a “good faith” standard that reduces the liability for retailers unless shown to be disregarding or willfully violating the law. This helps ease the burden on retailers, so long as they are working to comply with the law. Note that produce suppliers must provide country-of-origin information to retailers, and the truthfulness of that declaration is still subject to PACA law.
Retailers would not be liable for misinformation provided by suppliers, which should eliminate the need for retailers to audit their suppliers to ensure compliance.

No new record-keeping. Normal records kept in the regular course of doing business are sufficient to comply with the law. This is an important relief from the original law that threatened an extreme cost burden on the total supply chain.
A specific provision to allow labeling of a U.S. State, region or locality in which a product is produced to meet label standards as product of U.S. Therefore, a descriptor such as Minnesota Grown or Pride of New York would be sufficient labeling to comply with law. Produce suppliers and retailers across the industry strongly advocated for this change due to the many marketing programs and state/regional affiliations currently appearing in produce labeling.

With these provisions agreed to through tough negotiations with farm and consumer groups under the direct supervision of Congressional leaders, our associations will support these changes throughout Farm Bill consideration. Of course these changes are not law until finally passed by Congress and signed by the President, which we expect to occur by the end of the year. But, given the current state of negotiation on these issues, all parties believe these agreements are likely to hold through the process.

Because our associations have worked closely on this issue for several years, we are issuing this joint information alert to members of both associations. We would like to publicly acknowledge the work of United Fresh in negotiating these agreements with other stakeholders in Washington, DC, and PMA in assessing the impact of various specific proposals considered throughout the process.

In addition, we would like to thank the many produce associations and the Food Marketing Institute for working together to find common ground on what has been one of the more contentious issues facing the produce supply chain in many years. The next step will be to focus on the regulatory process at USDA as the Department develops the “rules of the road” to implement COOL in a way that provides useful information to consumers with minimal cost and negative impact on the total produce supply chain.
Tom Stenzel Bryan Silbermann
President President
United Fresh Produce Produce Marketing
Association Association

In politics, as in Train Surfing, timing is everything, and the fact that the Farm Bill came up in the aftermath of the Chinese food safety problems, which we dealt with many places including here, here, here and here defeated any chance of killing the bill.

Still the negotiations were mostly successful in eliminating the most egregious problems with the bill — although we don’t see any relief for fresh-cut manufacturers mentioned. This is a problem because blends can use product from different sources on different days, and fresh-cut processors will now have to either restrict their purchases or maintain stocks of many packaging iterations.

We were hoping for an allowance that packaging could contain a generic phrase such as “may contain product of Canada, Mexico, Italy and the United States,” but though the meat people negotiated some leeway on this, there is no mention of give in the produce category.
The real issue is how much work is going to be done for no benefit. Growers who have been pushing for this are going to be shocked at how little consumers care.

The reason is that geography is a feature and not a benefit, and features are a hard sell.

Yes, more than 70% of consumers say they want this information — which shows the kind of answers you get when you basically ask consumers whether they are concerned consumers who want information to make informed decisions or are they ignorant and lazy people who couldn’t care less. For the most part, this information will have no effect, and when it does have an impact, it will often tell you as much about people’s prejudices as about any nation’s food safety system.
In light of all the controversy over talks between PMA and United regarding a merger, one can’t help but get a chuckle out of these lines from the release:

Because our associations have worked closely on this issue for several years, we are issuing this joint information alert to members of both associations. We would like to publicly acknowledge the work of United Fresh in negotiating these agreements with other stakeholders in Washington, DC, and PMA in assessing the impact of various specific proposals considered throughout the process.

Of course, the associations deserve a high-five for working together and not duplicating effort, but still, the paragraph reads like a carefully choreographed scene from a Kabuki Opera with each party bowing to the other over and over again.

The COOL issue shows both that the line between marketing and government relations is blurry — which seems to add weight to calls for a merger and, also, that we did just fine with the two national associations, which argues against a merger.

But the battle over COOL left scars in the produce trade which may mean that things won’t go as smoothly next time. The initial falling out between United and WGA was, at least nominally, over the way COOL was handled.

In the aftermath of that fallout, many grower groups put together an ad hoc organization to keep an eye on events from the perspective of growers.

WGA’s new D.C. office, which we dealt with here and here can find its origination in the discussions held at that time in which growers talked about opening a D.C. office if United became insufficiently grower-oriented.

Although many thought that WGA and United had mended fences, the WGA Washington office is a lineal descendent of the battle over COOL.

United and PMA can co-exist because PMA does not lobby. PMA may provide information, and will review proposals; it will fund coalitions, but it doesn’t put a separate produce industry position before legislators.

Next time an issue like COOL has to be fought out, the lobbyists from United will say one thing and the lobbyists from WGA will say another — and WGA won’t be looking to agree with United, because then what is the point of having a DC office? WGA will be looking for ways to disagree with United because that establishes a need for the WGA office.

It is this division of the industry — between WGA and United, not the division between PMA and United — that threatens the trade’s “united” position on Capitol Hill.
 

Tex

Well-known member
Sounds like a bunch of whiners to me. Why are these groups griping that their big problem is the fact that they have to have correct packaging? Don't they already have that problem? If a producer packages a lettuce blend, don't they have to have all those lettuce blends correct when they advertise it on the label?

Maybe these packagers could tell us just how much more it will cost them to have one package over another and then compare that cost to the retail cost of the whole package. I bet this point would seem an insignificant point and would have much less of an impact than the argument seems to have as stated.

If these packagers/grocers can not do these simple things, maybe they should not be in the business of packaging and selling food.

Without consequences, no law is worth the paper it is written on.

If grocers/packagers/producers don't want to provide the kind of information like the country it came from, maybe their ability to sell products should be reviewed. No telling what else they they have a problem with in telling the truth.

You can look on the print of almost any package of food and see the ingredient list. Did this requirement make these products so expensive that they have an impact on sales? These arguments seem as empty as the responsibility these food chains seems to want to bear. Real attention should be looked at as to whether or not merchants in this chain of food supply have the ability or willingness to know what they are selling as food items to the public.

When these sellers want to label their products with all possible countries as a possibility for country of origin labeling, they reduce the significance to the information. Maybe they want a labeling law that suggests the products came from mother earth as to differentiate it from other stellar products.

This article shows an industry that is unwilling to provide an accurate country of origin label so that consumers can make a choice between the food safety standards of different countries. China's producers and suppliers ONLY have worthwhile safety systems when it is required by importers (as in the case of Japan and Hong Kong). Food safety concerns by the import systems from China to the U.S. ARE NOT adequate and retailers have not held China to having food safety systems. The FDA has not had adequate food safety standards as has been pointed out by numerous unsafe items in the U.S.. The FDA can't even require a food recall (they have to ask industry if it is okay). By having to ask companies to make recalls instead of requiring it, the regulatory authority of the FDA in respect to import food safety is mitigated to the point of nonexistence.

A food safety law with no consequences is worthless. It is the basis of the argument Rep. Bart Stupak had with Rep. Burgess in the oversight committee hearing of the FDA. Bart Stupak recognizes that the FDA is not doing its job and wants consumers to at least have the information available to them when they buy a product. Rep. Burgess resorted to attacking a country of origin law that is defective, even though it is his party that has made it defective by not having real consequences.

Guess who is getting paid off by industry not wanting country of origin labeling.
 

PORKER

Well-known member
Bart Stupak recognizes that the FDA is not doing its job and wants consumers to at least have the information available to them when they buy a product.

At least he is my Congressman and he listens.
 

Tex

Well-known member
I think Bart is great, what I have seen of him. We need more politicians like him. It is too bad he has an uphill fight. The economics of politics is what is at play here. If politicians can gain more by being incompetent or selling out the public's interest for that of corporations, they will do it.

I think the big money, short sound bites, and no accountability are real problems for our democracy. Our media's lack of interest in real issues and more in Brittany Spears is another.

The Supreme Court pronouncing that money is speech sides with those with the money. Our founding fathers meant for representatives to be chosen by the people, not by money, and not by the media and not by hokey political parties who give us the choice between corrupt or more corrupt or incompetent and more incompetent. All this is hidden by the masses finding out which is ruled, once again, by money.
 

PORKER

Well-known member
Bart Stupak was a state trooper ,tough as nails.He got every criminal he went after. He is a legend in Michigan.
 

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