Country of Origin Labeling Are You Concerned? (NAFTA, Representatives, Congress)

[citigirl]

More and more products are being found to have toxic ingredients or chemicals in their manufacture or processing. I want to know where everything I buy comes from. Some chemicals in dyes and paints are harmful and God only knows what is really going into food products or the level of cleanliness in processing. Do you want to know where a product comes from and are you also concerned?

[RedWingsFan]

Originally Posted by citigirl

Do you want to know where a product comes from and are you also concerned?

Yes, I think we should all know where the products are from. We should all be concerned, not even about the ingredients, but what all this outsourcing does to the job situtation for America.

[bily4]

Let me tell you something - globalization has gotten to the point there is no "country of origin" any more in a lot of cases. Material and components are bought from China and India, sent to the States so they can be redirected to Mexico for assembly taking advantage of NAFTA, then sent back to the States to put in a box and slap a U.S. flag on it. One example. Customs people have classes with corporations to try to slice and dice it so everyone is in compliance, but it is completely ridiculous at this point.

A lot of times U.S. companies will tell China the material they want used, then China will go and substitute their own local equivalent. Sometimes this gets caught and sometimes not. It is often extremely difficult now to accurately say what specific material goes into any given product.

[macmeal]

I agree with the above post. In our modern global economy, "country of origin" carries no more validity than asking "was this product made by fairly-paid employees? Was the work done in comfortable, adequately-lit surroundings, with at least a 20-minute rest break each 3 hours ?" Obviuosly, such an inquiry would get us nowhere. It's a big world out there, with some pretty dark corners in it--- maybe an attitude of "Ask me no questions, and I'll tell you no lies" might be the best policy for now.....

[tigerlily]

I agree with previous posters that in many instances country of origin labeling may be meaningless in a product that has more than one ingredient. I try to buy locally and am buying fewer and few of multi ingredient foods. That said, we can at least demand labeling on certain products such as meat. Food safety should not be politicized by either party.

Thank the powerful meat and grocery lobbies for restricting the labeling of food. The only reason we knew about the tainted Chinese seafood is because Ted Stevens protected the interests of his constituents in Alaska.

We need to let out representatives know we want country of origin labeling. Last month, USDA said it would reopen public comment to its so-called “country-of-origin” labeling measure until August 20.

Here's some clips from a NYT article published July 2nd.
"In every American supermarket, labels tell shoppers where their seafood came from. But there are no such labels for meat, produce or nuts.

Behind the contradiction is a lesson in political power in Washington, where lobbyists and members of Congress have managed to hold off the enforcement of a five-year-old law that required country-of-origin labeling on meat and produce as well as fish.
...

''No. 1, there's a basic consumer right to know,'' said Michael Hansen, senior scientist at Consumers Union, an advocacy group that publishes Consumer Reports magazine and supports the labeling law. ''People are more and more concerned about the food they eat.''

But the labeling law has formidable foes, including the meat lobby, which so far has outmaneuvered its opponents on Capitol Hill. In the years since the labeling law was enacted as part of the 2002 Farm Bill, its opponents have successfully blocked all but seafood labeling from taking effect.

Opponents of the law say they believe that it is too onerous and expensive and is simply a way for American farmers and ranchers to block cheaper foreign competitors.

Besides, they contend, retailers can voluntarily offer country-of-origin labels, as they do with hormone-free milk and organic foods.

''No one was prohibited from putting labels on products,'' said former Representative Henry Bonilla, Republican of Texas, who as head of the appropriations subcommittee on agriculture pushed through delays of mandatory origin labeling. ''If consumers wanted this, they could have demanded it.''

Critics say meatpackers simply do not want consumers to know that an increasing amount of hamburger meat and produce is being imported.

The fate of the country-of-origin labeling, known as COOL for short, will likely be resolved in the coming months as Congress rewrites farm policy.

The battle over the labeling law comes at a time when American farmers are facing increasing competition from all corners of the world: soybeans from Brazil, wheat from Ukraine and apples from China, to name a few. American consumers, meanwhile, are eating more food grown and processed overseas.

During the last decade, the value of imported food has roughly doubled, to $65.3 billion in 2006.

The meat lobby has historically been a powerful and efficient operation in Washington, with deep ties to Capitol Hill and the Department of Agriculture. Along with the grocery industry, the meat lobby has waged an effective campaign to stymie efforts to carry out the law.

The law required country-of-origin labeling on beef, pork, lamb, fresh fruits and vegetables, seafood and peanuts. To date, the debate has mainly been driven by the meat industry, with the produce and peanut industries playing a much quieter role.

The biggest supporters of the labeling law in Congress come from Great Plains states where ranchers face stiff competition from Canada.

A central reason the seafood labeling was pushed through in 2005 was Senator Ted Stevens, Republican of Alaska, who was chairman of the powerful Senate Committee on Appropriations at the time. He went to bat for Alaska fishermen, who benefited from a provision in the law that fish and shellfish include not only country of origin but whether it was farm-raised or caught in the wild.

Today, both sides of the debate over origin labeling contend that the seafood labels support their arguments.

For instance, in March, the Food Marketing Institute, a trade organization, said seafood labeling had cost 10 times more than original estimates and failed to increase sales of American seafood.

But the United Fishermen of Alaska tell a different story, saying that origin labeling has increased demand and prices for their wild salmon. And with the current concerns over Chinese seafood, labeling of seafood gives consumers the option to buy something else, advocates say.

The push for origin labeling started in the mid-1990s, when cattle ranchers grew frustrated by the influx of imported beef, particularly from Canada, as a result of trade agreements that opened the border to imports.

The thinking behind the proposal was that, given a choice, consumers would likely choose products from the United States over imported ones, even if they cost more. But origin labeling is not just about patriotism or a desire to help American farmers. Part of its appeal is better food oversight, and some proponents of the measure have played to consumer anxiety by calling into question the safety of meat from places like Mexico, Uruguay and Canada. China exports a negligible amount of meat to the United States.

''The consumer, upon seeing the U.S.D.A. label, would naturally presume that it's a U.S. product,'' said Bill Bullard, chief executive of the Ranchers-Cattlemen Action Legal fund, United Stockgrowers of America, an organization of cattle ranchers better known as R-Calf. He said the effect for meatpackers was that ''they are able to bring in a cheaper product and sell it under the reputation of the U.S. cattle industry.''

Opponents of origin labeling say the measure is simply protectionism, aided by false claims about imported products. American meatpackers may stop buying imported cattle altogether given the costs of segregating and keeping track of such products.

They also say it would be difficult and expensive to label ground meat like hamburger, since it often includes meat from different cows.

''They talk about how the quality is better in the United States,'' said Mark D. Dopp, senior vice president for regulator affairs and general counsel for the American Meat Institute, a trade group. ''The standards are all the same. For these people to talk about how all this inferior product is coming in, it's just nonsense.''

Legislation for origin labeling floundered until the 2002 Farm Bill was coming together, in part because of a strong push by Thomas A. Daschle, then the Senate majority leader, where support for the labeling law is strong. As a compromise, origin labeling was made voluntary for the first two years before becoming mandatory in 2004.

But those efforts were quickly undone by the meat lobby.

Just after the law was passed, the secretary of agriculture at the time, Ann M. Veneman, called it ''unfortunate'' and suggested that origin labeling could violate trade agreements, drawing a strong rebuke from the law's advocates in Congress.

During Ms. Veneman's tenure, the top ranks of the Department of Agriculture included executives with ties to the meatpacking industry. For instance, her chief of staff, Dale Moore, was the former head of legislative affairs for the National Cattlemen's Beef Association. The same trade group employed her director of communications, Alisa Harrison, and the deputy under secretary, Charles Lambert, who would have overseen the origin labeling program.

The National Cattlemen's Beef Association, which represents both ranchers and meatpackers, opposes origin labeling.

The Department of Agriculture estimated that the cost of paperwork to manage the program in its first year would be $1.9 billion, a figure the Government Accountability Office said was questionable and not supported by the agency's records.

But the real undoing of origin labeling occurred in Congress.

In 2003, a year before the labeling was supposed to go into effect, Mr. Bonilla pushed through a delay of mandatory origin labeling for another two years.

Two years later, again largely because of Mr. Bonilla's efforts, the House passed an appropriations bill that prohibited the Department of Agriculture from spending money to put into effect origin labeling until September 2007.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan group that tracks campaign spending, Mr. Bonilla received $158,328 in campaign funds in 2006 from the livestock industry, making him the top recipient in Congress. He was also the top recipient of campaign funds from the livestock industry in 2004, with $132,900, and ranked second in 2002, with $78,350.

Mr. Bonilla, who was defeated in 2006 by Ciro Rodriguez, said it was common for committee chairmen to receive contributions from the industries that they oversee. Besides, he said his Congressional district was a huge cattle ranching and agricultural region.

Mr. Bonilla does not dispute that he delayed the labeling law from taking effect. But he said it was a bad idea that would be costly to not only cattle producers and meatpackers but grocery stores as well.

...
For instance, Mr. Bonilla's successor on the subcommittee, Representative Rosa L. DeLauro, Democrat of Connecticut, is a supporter of the labeling law. Ms. DeLauro received $100,750 in campaign contributions from agribusiness in her 2006 campaign, $4,000 of which came from the livestock industry.

''There will be mandatory COOL by 2008 at the latest,'' she said.

[sunsprit]

I agree. Country of origin labeling may be complex for manufactured goods, but for food items it's an essential aspect of what we have in the marketplace.

I, for one, would rather know the origins so that I can decide for myself if I want to buy produce and other food items from a source. Since many countries use substances in their agriculture which are banned or restricted in the USA ... and my wife has serious food allergies to them which can have serious consequences ... it is not a trivial piece of information about food items.

In our case, the problem is serious enough that we've chosen to move to our own farm/ranch, where we organically produce much of what we eat (vegetables, beef, pork, lamb, chicken, duck, goose). But that's not a viable option for many others with celiac disease or similar food adverse reactions.

[Hawkeye48]

Congress passed and the president signed country of origin laws back in 2002. But due to lobbying efforts the law was shelved for two years, then again in 2006.

We have country of origin laws in place right now but President Bush refuses to enforce them. The new comment period opened up by the USDA means nothing. It's a stall tactic used to pacify corporate interests. The law is already passed and the USDA refuses to obey it deliberately endangering American lives to toxic foreign foods.

[Susan_in_New_England]

Originally Posted by citigirl

More and more products are being found to have toxic ingredients or chemicals in their manufacture or processing. I want to know where everything I buy comes from. Some chemicals in dyes and paints are harmful and God only knows what is really going into food products or the level of cleanliness in processing. Do you want to know where a product comes from and are you also concerned?

Yes. I am very concerned. Here is a link to a very well-documented article about how China cheats the labeling system.
[SIZE=2]Source: How China Hides Its Slave Labor From the Free World [/SIZE]

[SIZE=2]Of course I'm concerned. Now, that said, I get steaming mad over posts like this, that remind me of the insidious corruption existing in the world market, and the blind eye we turn on it. This problem seems monumental; but fundamentally, at least theoretically, and very probably, realistically, it's actually easy to fix. [/SIZE]
[SIZE=2]We all should be concerned about lead in our toys, but it's a symptom, not the cause. More than that, we should look at the bigger problem; the opportunity that NAFTA has provided for corruption and graft in these emerging and politically violatile markets, where outsourcing has lead to the loss of US jobs, and the downfall of the economy. But that's the least of it. What China is doing is called dumping. It's not just lead, but toxic waste from batteries, computer components, steel industry chemicals, etc., all of which are manufactured into the products China exports to NAFTA countries like the US. NAFTA was the worst mistake any sitting US president (in this case Clinton), has made in the last half-century. It was such a bad idea that it's put millions in the US out of work. Consumer spending is down because consumers in the US aren't sure whether they're going to have jobs next month, and they've gone into debt with easy credit and a growing hunger for spending in this "keeping up with the Jones'" society that slick marketing campaigns have created.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=2]As for slave labor used by places like China and India, Hong Kong and Taiwan: One company summed it up in a nutshell by stating that his business could only remain competitive and survive in the cut-throat "worldwide marketplace" if its manufactured goods came from the lowest bidder. If that happened to be China, with it's vast resource of slave and prison-camp labor; who cares? As long as there's a market for it in the US - and there is, thanks to the likes of Wal-Mart and Target, then who cares? And, more than the fact that this way of doing business not only degrades honest free market labor in North America, it is a human rights violation of the worst order, akin to Nazi prison camp labor. Companies wishing to do business this way (outsourcing) are corrupt and are supporters of slave labor. Why would you buy your products from them and continue to support the prevelance of this sort of evil in the world? US companies wishing to do business in these types of markets should be fined very heavily; so much so that it is no longer profitable for them to outsource labor. A portion of the resulting funds should in some way benefit US workers who have lost their jobs due to outsourcing, the rest should go into a closely monitored world human rights fund. Currently, when you buy anything made outside the US borders, you create demand for cheap and illegal labor, and keep some fat cat in China or elsewhere in the cuban cigars and luxury European automobiles that soon no citizen of the US will be able to afford, even working the 60-hour weeks that most of us are now forced to work in order to remain in our jobs, the threat of outsourcing ever-present.
For my part, I try hard to support and frequent family-owned businesses, where I know the products are made inside US or North American borders (and more typically the things I buy are made right here in my home state). I buy a lot of my goods from yard sales and flea markets, and freecycle - the products might be a little older, but it's pre-NAFTA (pre-1994), and that's fine with me. I also buy my produce from the town farmer's market. With the exception of most electronics (basically my computer), I'm able to stay true to my endeavor of purchasing as few products with labels of origin: "Made in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong," etc., as possible. [/SIZE]

[tinman01]

Yes I do want to know. There are some countries I boycott. ( when possible)
China, France, Mexico and Russia to name a few. I think the consumer has a right to know where the product is made.

[tablemtn]

Why would you boycott French products? They are generally very high-quality, and the food products are often great. There's no danger of China-style toxicity from those.

One problem with "Made in the USA" labeling is the amount of systemic abuse that has been made possible by corrupt politicians.

If you read about the Jack Abramoff scandal, one of his projects was lobbying on behalf of businesses in the American territory of the Northern Mariana Islands (where Saipan is located).

While technically a part of the US, Abramoff instructed his pocket lawmakers (like Tom DeLay) to kill measures requiring minimum wages and facility inspections of factories in the Marianas to ensure compliance with American labor laws.

So, we had Chinese companies bringing over workers from India, Bangladesh, and the Philippines, holding them effectively hostage as slave laborers, then bringing in partially-assembled fabrics and products from China for final assembly. The slave laborers "finished" the products, which allowed the company to legally slap a "Made in the USA" sticker on there.

Frontline did an episode about Abramoff and his various scandals, including the Marianas lobbying, but otherwise the media really fell down on that story.