COOL Wins

National Farmers Union (NFU) President Roger Johnson was extremely pleased after receiving news of the District Court of Appeals decision to deny an appeal to halt the enforcement COOL passed in 2008. “I was able to chat with him after the decision. “This is the third court decision that we have had in the last couple of years since they have been filing cases, maybe a little less than that. Every single court case we have won on every single issue. The guys that are bringing this, the big packers, the foreign interests in Canada and Mexico, who do not want us labeling products as to country of origin, have sued repeatedly and we have one every single case. We are still in court because so far these decisions have all been over the question of preliminary injunction. It is important for folks to get the big picture here. Many of the folks who are suing us and suing the government and saying consumers should not be told where their meat comes from, many of those same folks were sitting in the hearing room at the time that the 2008 Farm Bill was written. They agreed to the language that was put in the bill that required country of origin labeling. Not long after that, they went out and stirred up opposition on both sides of the border and got folks engaged at the WTO in bringing the cases against us.”