New law, intended to boost domestic meat sales, raises issues with imported animals

A new law designed to boost sales of domestic meat may shake up the meat industry. The law will require meatpackers to slaughter cattle and hogs born outside the U.S. separately from domestic animals. At least one major meatpacker will stop slaughtering foreign-born animals, and producers may no longer find viable the practice of importing animals to raise and sell.

Phillip Brasher of The Des Moines Register writes, "When the law first took effect Sept. 30, some major meatpackers planned to use multi-country labels on beef and pork so that they wouldn't have to track and slaughter U.S.-born livestock separately from livestock born in Canada and Mexico." This practice was deemed to violate labeling laws and was abandoned. Consequently, "At least three packers — Tyson Foods, Cargill and JBS Swift — now will segregate cattle and hogs by country of birth. Smithfield Foods said it will stop slaughtering Canadian-born hogs altogether next year."

The new law could hit the Iowa hog producers particularly hard. Producers in that state "imported about 4 million young pigs from Canada for fattening last year," writes Brasher. "Producers may get paid less for their Canadian-born hogs and may have to ship them to different slaughter plants, farther away, than they are used to, industry experts say."(Read more)