PORKER
Well-known member
Cattle Industry Concerned Over Mass Consumer Demand for Healthy, Fair Labor, Humane, Sustainable & Organic Food
Cattle Network: Seven Deadly Watchwords To Mark The New Year
By Dan Murphy
CattleNetwork.com, 12.29.06
Straight to the Source
The coming year might end in 007, but it doesn't take a secret agent to identify the battlefields on which the meat and poultry industries will contend next year.
Here are seven key areas where members of the industry will likely find plenty to occupy their down time in 2007.
That was a joke.
The issues on the horizon, unfortunately, are not.
But it's not all bad. With change comes opportunity, and there's nothing like a crisis to concentrate the mind on alternative solutions and technologies. In that spirit, let's begin.
Labor
A real mark of genius, picking labor and immigration issues as a battlefield in 2007, eh?
How could it be otherwise? With the recent Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids on six Swift meatpacking plants, resulting in the arrest of more than 1,200 workers (and let's not forget, only about 65 or 70 who will actually face criminal charges), the issue of the industry's work force, wage scale and recruiting practices are guaranteed to be near the top of the agenda of the incoming Democratic Congress.
One factor ought to head up industry's talking points: The sole reason ICE went after meatpackers is because they're there.
There are literally thousands of illegals on the streets and in the employ of dozens of companies in the foodservice, landscaping, hospitality and construction industries in just about every big city you care to name. But how do you round up half a dozen workers on a home building project? Or track down three guys mowing lawns for cash under the table? Or target illegal immigrants in hundreds of other occupations where only a handful of people might be toiling away at some manual labor job?
You don't. Instead, you swoop down on a big meat plant where a large work force is conveniently gathered in one place, under one roof, unable to flee.
If one fact has emerged from all the media coverage of the December raids that will ultimately cost Swift multi-millions and separate thousands of families — just in time for the holidays — it's the reality that the company, and nearly every other in the industry, was doing all it could to comply with the law. (Swift, in fact, was fined in 2002 by the feds for pushing too hard to verify workers' documents).
Truth is, there is no fail-safe system to ensure that an employer isn't hiring an illegal immigrant. As Robert Guenther, senior vice president for United Fresh Produce trade group so aptly phrased it, "There are no 'undocumented' workers. Everybody has documents."
Hopefully, that fact gets some traction in the year ahead. Otherwise, it's going to be a long and painful road for the industry to travel if it must carry the stigma of "the bad guys" in what promises to be a bruising battle over the entry and the subsequent employment of the millions of illegal immigrants already here and the thousands more sure to arrive in 2007.
Exports
In virtually every market where U.S. producers and packers had once confidently projected resounding growth, various technical, food-safety and legal obstacles are gutting the potential to restore — much less ramp up — meat and poultry export tonnage.
In South Korea, legislators there are considering reinstating an on-again, off-again ban on U.S. beef in a dispute over inspection standards. The country recently rejected three U.S. beef shipments because they allegedly contained bone fragments and claimed its inspectors had detected excessive amounts of dioxin in one U.S. beef shipment.
Elsewhere, Japan, Russia and other countries are plodding toward slow and partial restoration of boneless beef trade in the wake of the December 2003 discovery of a BSE cow and the border closures that followed. Here it is three years later, and what was once a multi-billion dollar growth market for U.S. beef, meat and poultry hasn't remotely recovered.
In the interim, other nations, including Australia, Brazil and Canada, among others, have seized large portions of the U.S. export market share. How — and whether — those markets can be recaptured will occupy the industry in 2007. And well beyond.
Energy
Expect corn prices to rise, and to continue to climb during 2007. That's the net effect of the surge in ethanol production as a seemingly simple answer to the nation's struggle for energy independence.
It's not — but that's another story.
Ethanol production from the 111 U.S. plants currently in operation will surpass 5.15 billion gallons this year, according to the trade group American Coalition for Ethanol. ACE estimates that more than 70 new plants are now under construction, most of which are expected to come online sometime in 2007.
Ethanol is now blended into 46 percent of U.S. gasoline, mostly as E10. That represents only about 3.5 percent of total consumption. However, with more than six million flexible fuel vehicles capable of burning E85 (85 percent ethanol) fuel already on the road, and with Chrysler, Ford, GM and Nissan all planning major increases in production of FFVs in 2007, that number could rise dramatically.
The bottom line is that more than 20 percent of the total U.S. corn crop is already being diverted to ethanol production, meaning that corn prices could (and likely will) continue to rise. Of course, the geniuses at USDA's Economic Research Service apparently consider the bigger bite ethanol is taking out of the domestic corn crop to be relatively benign, even forecasting a "net neutral" impact on prices.
Here are the sources from which ERS officials predict corn converted to ethanol could come: the U.S. share of global corn exports acreage currently devoted to soybean production the cultivation of new (and likely less suitable) cropland or foreign producers, such as Canada and Brazil.
I got news for ERS: None of the above is good!
Nor would the anticipated rise in corn prices be positive for feeders and producers.
In 2007, the air might a bit cleaner and our dependence on foreign oil a bit less strangling, but the tidal wave of ethanol sure to flood the domestic market is decidedly negative for the meat and poultry industry.
Natural
If there is one overriding trend in the marketing of meat and poultry it's the growth of "alternatives" to conventional (other prefer "commodity") beef, pork and poultry. From the big boys — Tyson, Cargill, National Beef, Seaboard Farms — to niche marketers to small-scale ranchers to organic, grassfed and even producers of "vegetarian beef," the marketplace is saturated with products whose prime positioning is that they're different (read, " better") than what consumers could find elsewhere in the case.
The looming regulatory attempt by USDA to redefine "natural" might act as something of a brake on the proliferation of meat products with that labeling designation, but it won't lessen the growing numbers of consumers seeking alternatives to what they perceive as less healthy, less desirable and less ecologically friendly food products.
Which leads to the next watchword industry will encounter in 2007.
Sustainability
The growth of niche products positioned as natural or organic or grassfed is ultimately an outgrowth of public consciousness of what is loosely labeled as "sustainability."
Organic foods, for example, started out 30 years ago as a way to avoid "deadly" pesticide residues, and by extension, to support farmers who didn't apply such chemicals to their acreage. Today, the linchpin of organic marketing is much broader and is tied to an eco-friendly mitigation of so-called industrial agriculture's environmental impact.
Likewise, the rise of grass-fed beef as a supposedly superior choice for conscious consumers has its roots in consumer perceptions of how large-scale feedlots, confinement production sites, energy and resource-intensive conventional crop production are supposedly harming the environment.
Certainly, some high-profile taste tests have lent culinary momentum to the growth of grass-fed beef and natural pork, but its real traction is that potential users see such products as a lever to reverse the perceived environmental damage caused by conventional meat production.
Those perceptions are only going to harden throughout 2007 and beyond, because this trend is bigger than the food industry. Sustainability has linked the reality that every consumer product creates an "environmental footprint." From consumer products mass-produced in China and other low-wage countries to procurement of raw materials, energy and even intellectual resources, everything required by our post-modern lifestyles has a cost that extends well beyond the visible price tag.
Certainly, that truth is stretched and spun by various interest groups for selfish purposes, but there is no denying the cost that must be paid for all the products we consume. For an industry that evolved in synergy with the (truly) natural cycles of life and growth and harvesting, the impact of a potentially sustainable production model for meat and poultry cannot be underestimated.
Science
Get set for a battle over consumption and labeling of meat and milk from cloned animals next year. The Food and Drug Administration has already signaled its intention to approve such products for the marketplace. Agency scientists concluded in a study in the Jan. 1 issue of Theriogenology (yes, I had to look it up — from the Greek for "beast," it's the study of animal genetics) that "meat and milk from clones and their progeny is as safe to eat as corresponding products derived from animals produced using contemporary agricultural practices."
Compounding matter, at least from the activists' standpoint, is the agency's apparent willingness to forego any requirement that such products be labeled at retail. Which is raw meat for the consumer watchdogs who plan to nurture the "outrage" over cloning that they hope Americans will harbor.
At the Center for Food Safety, the anti-Big Ag/pro-organic foods group, legal director Joseph Mendelson firmly, if a bit awkwardly, stated that, "Consumers are going to be having a product that has potential safety issues and has a whole load of ethical issues tied to it, without any labeling."
At the Consumer Federation of America, Carol Tucker Foreman, director of food policy, fumed that FDA is "ignoring research" showing cloning results in more deaths and deformed animals than other reproductive technologies. Though it will go nowhere, CFA will be spearheading a movement to encourage food processors and retailers to refuse to sell cloned food. "Meat and milk from cloned animals have no benefit for consumers, and consumers don't want them in their foods," Tucker Foreman claimed.
Although two-thirds of consumers sampled in September by the non-partisan Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology reported they were "uncomfortable with food from cloned animals," the campaign over cloning is merely an extension of the fight over the safety and positioning of GMOs, the food ingredients produced from bioengineered crops.
CFA and plenty of other NGOs (like Greenpeace) have already sniffed the potential of turning the public's concerns over technologies most people poorly understand into a sustained fundraising bonanza for their organizations. Thus, expect plenty of horror stories in 2007 associating cloning and cloned livestock to the whole Frankenfoods campaign — which, frankly, is losing some steam as memories of the Starlink debacle fade from even the most dedicated veggie activist's consciousness.
Ironically, the use of cloning as a widely deployed tool in livestock production is hardly a certainty. According to the International Dairy Foods Association, only about 150 out of the nine million-strong U.S. dairy herd are clones — and many of those are show animals.
Beef, pork and dairy producers don't need cloning. It's merely another breeding technology, not an essential element of the industry's survival. While there's no value in a voluntary moratorium on cloning, it would be wise for the industry to stay low-profile, let the shouters soak up their moments of media attention and calmly wait for the furor to subside, for the activists to move on and for the public to eventually forget what the fight was all about.
Opportunity
I suggested at the top of this column, about an hour ago, that there was opportunity in all the turmoil sure to stir up the marketplace in 2007. Let's close with a brief look at three such areas. Someone's going to cash in on these, I believe.
First is specialty product development. This trend has already begun with the emergence of niche product positioning, as noted above. But whether it's convenience foods, higher-end packaging or meat-as-mealtime-ingredient, the pipeline for potentially successful new products is hardly overfilled. While it remains costly to develop, test and launch new products, it's ultimately more costly to cede share of stomach and food dollar to non-meat alternatives.
Second is online sales and marketing. Few companies in the industry take this emerging opportunity seriously enough to commit to the requisite investment in infrastructure and marketing resources. Thus, the category has been left primarily to a loose collection of entrepreneurs, mom n' pops and often outrageously amateurish hucksters. I'd like to think that a year from now, what is undeniably a huge — and hungry — potential customer base won't be left solely to the folks currently marketing and moving their merchandise across the Internet.
Finally, the other side of that coin: retail merchandising. Two-and-a-half decades after every commentator, editor and hired-gun guru began preaching about the potentially positive impact of aggressive merchandising and cross-merchandising of retail meat and poultry products, today's grocery and club store environment looks depressingly familiar: a virtual throwback to the 1980s.
Only without the friendly signage and helpful store personnel.
I know there's this "clean case" movement going on, but does shopping the meat department have to be about as enjoyable — and informative — as hitting the buttons on a vending machine?
Hopefully, we'll get that question — and a lot of other ones — answered in the next 12 months.
On that note, a most happy and prosperous New Year to all Vocal Point readers: patrons, supporters and haters alike.
It's your involvement that matters most.
By Dan Murphy on Friday, December 29, 2006
Cattle Network: Seven Deadly Watchwords To Mark The New Year
By Dan Murphy
CattleNetwork.com, 12.29.06
Straight to the Source
The coming year might end in 007, but it doesn't take a secret agent to identify the battlefields on which the meat and poultry industries will contend next year.
Here are seven key areas where members of the industry will likely find plenty to occupy their down time in 2007.
That was a joke.
The issues on the horizon, unfortunately, are not.
But it's not all bad. With change comes opportunity, and there's nothing like a crisis to concentrate the mind on alternative solutions and technologies. In that spirit, let's begin.
Labor
A real mark of genius, picking labor and immigration issues as a battlefield in 2007, eh?
How could it be otherwise? With the recent Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids on six Swift meatpacking plants, resulting in the arrest of more than 1,200 workers (and let's not forget, only about 65 or 70 who will actually face criminal charges), the issue of the industry's work force, wage scale and recruiting practices are guaranteed to be near the top of the agenda of the incoming Democratic Congress.
One factor ought to head up industry's talking points: The sole reason ICE went after meatpackers is because they're there.
There are literally thousands of illegals on the streets and in the employ of dozens of companies in the foodservice, landscaping, hospitality and construction industries in just about every big city you care to name. But how do you round up half a dozen workers on a home building project? Or track down three guys mowing lawns for cash under the table? Or target illegal immigrants in hundreds of other occupations where only a handful of people might be toiling away at some manual labor job?
You don't. Instead, you swoop down on a big meat plant where a large work force is conveniently gathered in one place, under one roof, unable to flee.
If one fact has emerged from all the media coverage of the December raids that will ultimately cost Swift multi-millions and separate thousands of families — just in time for the holidays — it's the reality that the company, and nearly every other in the industry, was doing all it could to comply with the law. (Swift, in fact, was fined in 2002 by the feds for pushing too hard to verify workers' documents).
Truth is, there is no fail-safe system to ensure that an employer isn't hiring an illegal immigrant. As Robert Guenther, senior vice president for United Fresh Produce trade group so aptly phrased it, "There are no 'undocumented' workers. Everybody has documents."
Hopefully, that fact gets some traction in the year ahead. Otherwise, it's going to be a long and painful road for the industry to travel if it must carry the stigma of "the bad guys" in what promises to be a bruising battle over the entry and the subsequent employment of the millions of illegal immigrants already here and the thousands more sure to arrive in 2007.
Exports
In virtually every market where U.S. producers and packers had once confidently projected resounding growth, various technical, food-safety and legal obstacles are gutting the potential to restore — much less ramp up — meat and poultry export tonnage.
In South Korea, legislators there are considering reinstating an on-again, off-again ban on U.S. beef in a dispute over inspection standards. The country recently rejected three U.S. beef shipments because they allegedly contained bone fragments and claimed its inspectors had detected excessive amounts of dioxin in one U.S. beef shipment.
Elsewhere, Japan, Russia and other countries are plodding toward slow and partial restoration of boneless beef trade in the wake of the December 2003 discovery of a BSE cow and the border closures that followed. Here it is three years later, and what was once a multi-billion dollar growth market for U.S. beef, meat and poultry hasn't remotely recovered.
In the interim, other nations, including Australia, Brazil and Canada, among others, have seized large portions of the U.S. export market share. How — and whether — those markets can be recaptured will occupy the industry in 2007. And well beyond.
Energy
Expect corn prices to rise, and to continue to climb during 2007. That's the net effect of the surge in ethanol production as a seemingly simple answer to the nation's struggle for energy independence.
It's not — but that's another story.
Ethanol production from the 111 U.S. plants currently in operation will surpass 5.15 billion gallons this year, according to the trade group American Coalition for Ethanol. ACE estimates that more than 70 new plants are now under construction, most of which are expected to come online sometime in 2007.
Ethanol is now blended into 46 percent of U.S. gasoline, mostly as E10. That represents only about 3.5 percent of total consumption. However, with more than six million flexible fuel vehicles capable of burning E85 (85 percent ethanol) fuel already on the road, and with Chrysler, Ford, GM and Nissan all planning major increases in production of FFVs in 2007, that number could rise dramatically.
The bottom line is that more than 20 percent of the total U.S. corn crop is already being diverted to ethanol production, meaning that corn prices could (and likely will) continue to rise. Of course, the geniuses at USDA's Economic Research Service apparently consider the bigger bite ethanol is taking out of the domestic corn crop to be relatively benign, even forecasting a "net neutral" impact on prices.
Here are the sources from which ERS officials predict corn converted to ethanol could come: the U.S. share of global corn exports acreage currently devoted to soybean production the cultivation of new (and likely less suitable) cropland or foreign producers, such as Canada and Brazil.
I got news for ERS: None of the above is good!
Nor would the anticipated rise in corn prices be positive for feeders and producers.
In 2007, the air might a bit cleaner and our dependence on foreign oil a bit less strangling, but the tidal wave of ethanol sure to flood the domestic market is decidedly negative for the meat and poultry industry.
Natural
If there is one overriding trend in the marketing of meat and poultry it's the growth of "alternatives" to conventional (other prefer "commodity") beef, pork and poultry. From the big boys — Tyson, Cargill, National Beef, Seaboard Farms — to niche marketers to small-scale ranchers to organic, grassfed and even producers of "vegetarian beef," the marketplace is saturated with products whose prime positioning is that they're different (read, " better") than what consumers could find elsewhere in the case.
The looming regulatory attempt by USDA to redefine "natural" might act as something of a brake on the proliferation of meat products with that labeling designation, but it won't lessen the growing numbers of consumers seeking alternatives to what they perceive as less healthy, less desirable and less ecologically friendly food products.
Which leads to the next watchword industry will encounter in 2007.
Sustainability
The growth of niche products positioned as natural or organic or grassfed is ultimately an outgrowth of public consciousness of what is loosely labeled as "sustainability."
Organic foods, for example, started out 30 years ago as a way to avoid "deadly" pesticide residues, and by extension, to support farmers who didn't apply such chemicals to their acreage. Today, the linchpin of organic marketing is much broader and is tied to an eco-friendly mitigation of so-called industrial agriculture's environmental impact.
Likewise, the rise of grass-fed beef as a supposedly superior choice for conscious consumers has its roots in consumer perceptions of how large-scale feedlots, confinement production sites, energy and resource-intensive conventional crop production are supposedly harming the environment.
Certainly, some high-profile taste tests have lent culinary momentum to the growth of grass-fed beef and natural pork, but its real traction is that potential users see such products as a lever to reverse the perceived environmental damage caused by conventional meat production.
Those perceptions are only going to harden throughout 2007 and beyond, because this trend is bigger than the food industry. Sustainability has linked the reality that every consumer product creates an "environmental footprint." From consumer products mass-produced in China and other low-wage countries to procurement of raw materials, energy and even intellectual resources, everything required by our post-modern lifestyles has a cost that extends well beyond the visible price tag.
Certainly, that truth is stretched and spun by various interest groups for selfish purposes, but there is no denying the cost that must be paid for all the products we consume. For an industry that evolved in synergy with the (truly) natural cycles of life and growth and harvesting, the impact of a potentially sustainable production model for meat and poultry cannot be underestimated.
Science
Get set for a battle over consumption and labeling of meat and milk from cloned animals next year. The Food and Drug Administration has already signaled its intention to approve such products for the marketplace. Agency scientists concluded in a study in the Jan. 1 issue of Theriogenology (yes, I had to look it up — from the Greek for "beast," it's the study of animal genetics) that "meat and milk from clones and their progeny is as safe to eat as corresponding products derived from animals produced using contemporary agricultural practices."
Compounding matter, at least from the activists' standpoint, is the agency's apparent willingness to forego any requirement that such products be labeled at retail. Which is raw meat for the consumer watchdogs who plan to nurture the "outrage" over cloning that they hope Americans will harbor.
At the Center for Food Safety, the anti-Big Ag/pro-organic foods group, legal director Joseph Mendelson firmly, if a bit awkwardly, stated that, "Consumers are going to be having a product that has potential safety issues and has a whole load of ethical issues tied to it, without any labeling."
At the Consumer Federation of America, Carol Tucker Foreman, director of food policy, fumed that FDA is "ignoring research" showing cloning results in more deaths and deformed animals than other reproductive technologies. Though it will go nowhere, CFA will be spearheading a movement to encourage food processors and retailers to refuse to sell cloned food. "Meat and milk from cloned animals have no benefit for consumers, and consumers don't want them in their foods," Tucker Foreman claimed.
Although two-thirds of consumers sampled in September by the non-partisan Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology reported they were "uncomfortable with food from cloned animals," the campaign over cloning is merely an extension of the fight over the safety and positioning of GMOs, the food ingredients produced from bioengineered crops.
CFA and plenty of other NGOs (like Greenpeace) have already sniffed the potential of turning the public's concerns over technologies most people poorly understand into a sustained fundraising bonanza for their organizations. Thus, expect plenty of horror stories in 2007 associating cloning and cloned livestock to the whole Frankenfoods campaign — which, frankly, is losing some steam as memories of the Starlink debacle fade from even the most dedicated veggie activist's consciousness.
Ironically, the use of cloning as a widely deployed tool in livestock production is hardly a certainty. According to the International Dairy Foods Association, only about 150 out of the nine million-strong U.S. dairy herd are clones — and many of those are show animals.
Beef, pork and dairy producers don't need cloning. It's merely another breeding technology, not an essential element of the industry's survival. While there's no value in a voluntary moratorium on cloning, it would be wise for the industry to stay low-profile, let the shouters soak up their moments of media attention and calmly wait for the furor to subside, for the activists to move on and for the public to eventually forget what the fight was all about.
Opportunity
I suggested at the top of this column, about an hour ago, that there was opportunity in all the turmoil sure to stir up the marketplace in 2007. Let's close with a brief look at three such areas. Someone's going to cash in on these, I believe.
First is specialty product development. This trend has already begun with the emergence of niche product positioning, as noted above. But whether it's convenience foods, higher-end packaging or meat-as-mealtime-ingredient, the pipeline for potentially successful new products is hardly overfilled. While it remains costly to develop, test and launch new products, it's ultimately more costly to cede share of stomach and food dollar to non-meat alternatives.
Second is online sales and marketing. Few companies in the industry take this emerging opportunity seriously enough to commit to the requisite investment in infrastructure and marketing resources. Thus, the category has been left primarily to a loose collection of entrepreneurs, mom n' pops and often outrageously amateurish hucksters. I'd like to think that a year from now, what is undeniably a huge — and hungry — potential customer base won't be left solely to the folks currently marketing and moving their merchandise across the Internet.
Finally, the other side of that coin: retail merchandising. Two-and-a-half decades after every commentator, editor and hired-gun guru began preaching about the potentially positive impact of aggressive merchandising and cross-merchandising of retail meat and poultry products, today's grocery and club store environment looks depressingly familiar: a virtual throwback to the 1980s.
Only without the friendly signage and helpful store personnel.
I know there's this "clean case" movement going on, but does shopping the meat department have to be about as enjoyable — and informative — as hitting the buttons on a vending machine?
Hopefully, we'll get that question — and a lot of other ones — answered in the next 12 months.
On that note, a most happy and prosperous New Year to all Vocal Point readers: patrons, supporters and haters alike.
It's your involvement that matters most.
By Dan Murphy on Friday, December 29, 2006