Group Calls NCBA Attack Desperate Attempt to Deflect Attention Away From Its Cheating With Checkoff Dollars
Source: R-CALF USA - Sept 1, 2010
Billings, Mont. - In a desperate attempt to deflect attention away from the fact that the National Cattlemen's Beef Association (NCBA) stands accused of cheating and misusing government-mandated Beef Checkoff Program dollars, NCBA has resurrected its tiresome attack against R-CALF USA for working with consumer groups such as Food & Water Watch.
When R-CALF USA worked with Food & Water Watch, the Consumers Federation of America and numerous other consumer groups to pass country-of-origin labeling earlier this decade and then joined with these same consumer groups in a 2007 lawsuit to prevent the introduction of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, or BSE disease) from imported Canadian cattle, NCBA cried loudly that R-CALF USA was working with the enemy.
"This is absurd," said R-CALF USA CEO Bill Bullard. "These consumer groups represent thousands of consumers who happen to be the very people we depend on to eat beef. If we are to improve beef demand, we must promote our product and explain how we raise our product to the members of these groups. What better way to accomplish this than to work directly with these groups to better demonstrate that the U.S.
cattle industry is serious about continuing to raise the safest, most wholesome beef in the world and under the best of conditions?"
Bullard said that R-CALF USA learned long ago that its effectiveness in preventing the multinational meatpackers and their closely aligned trade associations, including NCBA, from capturing control of the live cattle supply chain - just as they have already captured control over the poultry and hog supply chains - is dependent on building coalitions with numerous organizations that agree with R-CALF USA's positions on particular issues.
"We succeeded in passing country-of-origin labeling because we built a coalition of hundreds of various groups - including Food & Water Watch - that support this issue and we succeeding in delaying, for several years, the meatpackers' efforts to prematurely relax our BSE restrictions, again by building a huge coalition," he pointed out. "Recently, we formed a coalition of dozens of groups, again including Food & Water Watch, to prevent the government from importing fresh beef and cattle from Brazil, a country still fighting foot-and-mouth disease (FMD). And, now, we're continuing to build a coalition to support USDA's (U.S. Department of Agriculture's) GIPSA (Grain Inspection, Packers and Stockyards Administration) rule that will halt the erosion of competition in the U.S. cattle market."
Bullard explained that the meatpackers hate USDA's proposed rule because it would require them to be accountable for their cattle procurement practices, requires meatpackers to keep records so USDA can determine if they are in compliance with the Packers and Stockyards Act (PSA), requires them to be transparent in their marketing practices, and it prohibits certain known, anticompetitive behavior that he said is pervasive in the marketplace where slaughter-ready cattle are sold to packers.
Bullard also said that Food & Water Watch has independently compiled research showing how the growing spread between the price of fed cattle and the price of beef that consumers pay at the grocery store demonstrates that under our current industry structure, the packing and retailing sectors are exploiting both consumers and producers.
"NCBA is supporting the meatpackers' efforts to kill the proposed GIPSA rule, and a June audit of NCBA's management of the government-mandated Beef Checkoff Program revealed that NCBA has misused funds contributed by every cattle producer in America.
"NCBA has breached the trust of every U.S. cattle producer, and rather than to repay the funds the audit indicated were used inappropriately, including NCBA's lobbying influence that is facilitated and greatly enhanced by its receipt of Beef Checkoff funds, NCBA is desperately trying to restore its lost credibility, but it is only digging a deeper hole," Bullard concluded "People, particularly cattle producers, don't appreciate organizations that try to deflect attention away from the issue at hand by trying to tear down other organizations such as Food & Water Watch."
