Moving Forward with Country of Origin Compliance

Moving Forward with Country of Origin Compliance

I’m KayDee Gilkey with today’s Open Range.

The US has until late May to comply with a World Trade Organization rulings pertaining to Country of Origin Labeling for meat.

The Chief Counsel of US Trade Representative's Office, Tim Reif, explains a recent World Trade Organization ruling on administering U.S. Country of Origin Labeling of meat.

Reif: “The way we administer the statute was found to be out of compliance with something with the WTO calls National Treatment. National Treatment means that we are treating imports the same way we treating domestic product. And here the WTO particularly found that the amount of record keeping that we require, the burden of the record keeping which falls disproportionally on the Canadians and Mexicans was out of sync with the amount of information we were providing the consumer in the packaging of these products once the product hit the grocery store.”

Reif says there are some choices to be made to become compliant.

Reif: “We have to find a way to either lessen the amount of information we are asking from the Canadians and Mexicans and others so it is more in sync with the amount of information we are providing to the consumer. Or we can ask for more information from the Canadians and Mexicans and others and provide more information to the consumer. We need to do one or the other of those things to bring ourselves back into a balance that we think the WTO would find consistent.”