While some (first name to pop in my noggin is R-Calf, the ranchers responsible for closing the Canadian Border to Beef) feel COOL (Country of Origin Labeling) is a good thing, but they are fighting tooth and nail to fight Animal ID--a small radio-frequency ID tag (like the computer chips for your dog & cats, and guess what? Pioneered by the fine folks at Walmart to track inventory) that would track every animal in the country, and ensure COOL will work. Think of the RFID as the Branding Iron of the 21st century.

A well balanced interview from an Academic (as opposed to a talking head/spin doctor) can be found at http://www.cattlenetwork.com/Content.asp?ContentID=142741

I sell steaks for a living, so I both buy & sell and have a real love/hate relationship with the idea of COOL. The xenophobia surrounding the issue of COOL concerns me:if its American, it *MUST* be better (have you tried the sodas from Mexico? YUM! Real Cane Sugar!). BUT, I also want to make sure I'm buying AMERICAN, 'cause I *AM* patriotic, and local *IS* better. AND I won't buy Chinese, first because I never forgot Tiannemen Square, oh and that small thing about anti-freeze, and I don't want food with real chucks of fresh political prisoners. BUT COOL is just adding paperwork and bureaucrazy without addressing food safety. As a rule, I hate bureaucracy.

But *IF* you believe COOL is a food safety issue, that because China can't figure out food from plastic and you believe Canadians are still secretly trying to turn cows into cannibals... then you will also need to call your congress critters to push Animal ID. This will ensure we know cradle to plate, everywhere that cow has been. It will cost a little more, but honestly it looks to be less than a few cents per pound (with all labor and paper/data bytes accounted for). If there is a new MAD cow outbreak, they can know in 45 minutes time every herd that cow ran with (plus a week to adjust for Bureaucratic Standard Time). Just in time for the evening news can run the preliminary false-positive "sky-is-falling" report, all to drop the price of beef I buy. Thank you for panicking!

Note: RFID will not work for chickens, unless you don't mind paying $5 dozen for eggs and $20 for a whole roaster.
Question: How high a price are you willing to pay? What about this made-up scenario: Chex Mix where they might use US Corn and Canadian Wheat? What if they ran out of US Wheat half-way through the batch? Can you tag every grain with the "Made in USA" label (and what happens when it's ground into flour), or is it stiff fines and hard time in a federal prison? AT what price will you stop buying US grain-fed beef over their Argentine brethren? Are you satisfied with the Dinty Moore stew labeled with the generic "Made from products of the USA, Canada, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Azerbaijan & Antarctica" (I'm exaggerating). COOL sounds easy, but the devil is in the details.

How much would this labeling have helped during the e. coli outbreaks?

If they'd just stop doing business with repeat offenders (or stop for six months, then recheck them closely), this wouldn't be as necessary AFAIK.

After reading New Mexi-cow's question, I think I'll check out those cornish hens again the next time we go to the feed store (assuming bird flu doesn't strike my area, wow there'd be a lot of private places to enforce culling around here).

Mr. Mexi-Cow,

As I understand it, you raise five concerns about the advisability of mandatory COOL. I will address these in turn.

1) You seem to be under the impression that mandatory COOL requires the use of RFID tags. This is incorrect: the proposed legislation does not require tracking of individual animals, much less specify the method of doing so.

Additionally, support of mandatory COOL does not necessarily entail support of individual animal tracking via RFID. Mandatory COOL simply requires that the market supply consumers with certain information. Mandatory RFID tracking requires the use of particular technology, technology which the market may come to reject over time as technological and operational solutions evolve.

2) Consumer's motivations for demanding this information are irrelevant to the ecomonic question. Insofar as consumers express a preference, a market which is structurally unable to allocate resources in response to that preference is a failure, regardless of the biases which give rise to that preference.

Additionally, country-of-origin information may function as a signal of quality or preferability. New Zealand lamb, for instance, is well-regarded and often commands a higher market price than lamb from unknown origins. Providing origin information about all products creates incentives for food-producing countries to improve the reputations of their products.

3) COOL can certainly be a food safety issue. Knowing food origins allows the market to adapt more quickly to food-borne illness outbreaks once the geographic source of the illness has been identified. In the case of beef, centralized packing/processing negates this benefit somewhat, but the structural features of a single market segment (i.e., beef) shouldn't cause an idea with food-safety benefits across the food industry to be defeated.

4) Price-per-pound estimates vary widely; however the socio-economic benefits as described in points 2 and 3 above (viz., increased market efficiency in terms of allocating resources according to consumer preferences, and diminished health-care costs due to a more rapid market-driven response to food-borne illness) strongly mitigate against the per-pound price increase argument.

5) The facts of your made-up scenario do not apply: the mandatory COOL requirements currently being discussed specifically exempt processed foods.

Regards,

Law for Food.

Errata. I wrote:

"...a market which is structurally unable to allocate resources in response to that preference is a failure..."

That is incorrect. The more precise way of writing what I meant to write is: "when a market is structurally unable to allocate resources in accordance with consumer's preferences, that is an incident of market failure."

Regards,

Law for Food.

Read this after my earlier comment:

"'You mean 60 percent cardboard? What is the other 40 percent?' asks the reporter. 'Fatty meat,' the man replies.

"The bun maker and his assistants then give a demonstration on how the product is made.

"Squares of cardboard picked from the ground are first soaked to a pulp in a plastic basin of caustic soda _ a chemical base commonly used in manufacturing paper and soap _ then chopped into tiny morsels with a cleaver. Fatty pork and powdered seasoning are stirred in."

Beijing Steamed Buns Include Cardboard
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/12/AR2007071200272.html