Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act 2015

Floor Speech

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Mr. CRAWFORD. Mr. Chairman, I rise to engage in an important colloquy with Agriculture Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman Aderholt of Alabama and the ranking member of the Livestock Subcommittee on the House Ag Committee, Mr. Costa of California, regarding the issue of mandatory country of origin labeling, or COOL, for beef, pork, and poultry.

Mr. Chairman, as you know, I strongly support discontinuing the overreaching country of origin labeling regulations that not only burden our Nation's livestock industry, but threaten massive retaliatory tariffs from Canada and Mexico on a vast range of U.S. industry and products.

I appreciate your work in the Agriculture Appropriations Subcommittee to include a directive in the bill's report language requiring USDA to discontinue enforcement of COOL, should the WTO compliance panel rule against the United States when they make their decision in a few weeks.

However, I believe the final appropriations bill should include the strongest language possible to prevent any further harm to the livestock industry and all industries threatened on the retaliatory trade list.

COOL represents yet another failed policy of the Federal Government, imposing costly and burdensome mandates on private sector industry. While the primary goal of COOL is to give American-grown meat a competitive advantage, the result has been exactly the opposite.

As a direct result of this policy, we are not only seeing sharp increases in the cost of marketing and selling beef and pork, but trade retaliation from our closest trading partners will cost us billions of dollars in trade, which will kill U.S. jobs, harm our competitiveness, and have a long-term negative impact on American industry.

As you prepare for conference, I hope we can work together to make sure the final bill provides the most appropriate response to this problem.

With that, I yield to the gentleman from California (Mr. Costa).

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