Country-of-Origin Labeling

COUNTRY-OF-ORIGIN LABELING -- (Senate - October 28, 2005)

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Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I was a member of the conference that the Senator from South Dakota just described. I, too, refused to sign the conference report this week. I think when Senator Johnson uses the term ``outrage,'' it is a very appropriate word to describe what happened in that conference. That conference recessed at the call of the Chair. We never reconvened. And behind closed doors with some secret deal, the majority party decided to hear the siren call of the big packing houses and others, and they extended by 2 years the effective date of the time when the American people would finally figure out, by labels, where the meat they were eating would come from.

The reason I think this meat labeling is important, we label everything. We label T-shirts, shoes, shirts. Name it, we label it. Go to the grocery store, see what is labeled. Everything on the shelf is labeled. But then pick up a piece of meat and figure out if we know where it came from.

I held up a piece of steak on the Senate floor one day and said: I defy anyone to tell me where this came from. Then I read a report from an inspector who went to a plant in Mexico, inspected the plant--this is a plant shipping meat to this country. He said there were carcasses hanging in unrefrigerated rooms, with feces smeared on the carcasses, all ready to be thrown in the hopper to be cut up and the meat sent to American consumers. That is what he found, one inspection. By the way, they closed that plant. Then it changed its name, changed its ownership, reopened, and has never again been inspected.

That is why when one asks the question, How do you like your steak, the answer ought to be, I like my steak from places where it is healthy meat. We do not know where the healthy meat comes from unless we see a label to be able to determine where that meat comes from. That is why the Senator from South Dakota and I and others have fought so aggressively to get this meat-labeling law in place. It is now the law of the land. We have people making secret deals behind closed doors to try to shut it down, to prevent it from ever being implemented. That is what happened this week. That is why I refused to sign the conference report as well. I appreciate the effort of the Senator from South Dakota. There are about half a dozen of us who would not sign the conference report because this was an arrogant approach to make a secret deal behind closed doors that injures the consumers of this country. We should not put up with it.

Mr. JOHNSON. If I may ask a question of my colleague and my friend from North Dakota, does it not seem to the Senator that part of the reason we have lost essentially our entire export market for beef in America is in part because even countries that want to buy American beef, that understand we have the safest, highest quality beef in the world, are not confident that we are, in fact, selling them American beef? Their fear is that this may be Canadian, it may be Mexican, it may be Argentine. Who knows where this beef comes from in the United States because we are one of the few industrialized democracies in the world that do not have country-of-origin labeling in place for meat. That undermines the integrity of our sales abroad and further complicates our recapture of these lost export markets.

Does the Senator see that as one of the contributing factors to our loss of export market?

Mr. DORGAN. I do not think there is any question but that is the case. We do not have labeling of this meat; other countries do. So we have a homogenization of all kinds of meat that comes into this country, gets mixed here and there and everywhere.

The Senator from South Dakota said something very important. Our farmers and ranchers in this country raise beef, meat. We raise a healthy supply of meat. We inspect it. We have the healthiest supply of meat anywhere in the world. I think the lack of having country-of-origin labeling on the meat that is sold in this country hurts all of us. It hurts our consumers as they consume. It also hurts us in our ability to get into foreign markets, as my colleague has just described.

Once again, the big interests get the attention around here behind closed doors, outside of the view of the public. So we come out with legislation now that says, well, not only is there a law that requires country-of-origin labeling, we will not allow that law to take effect. It has been in place for some while. We will extend for 2 years the excuse to allow the Department of Agriculture not to put it in effect. It is, as the Senator has used the term, an outrage. It is the wrong way for this Congress to legislate.

I thank the Senator from South Dakota for yielding.

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