CALF_News_June_July_2020

16 CALF News • June | July 2020 • www.calfnews.net That’s not near enough if you’re an operator of any size at all. NCBA and more than 20 state affiliates were part of another letter to Sec. Perdue encouraging USDA to remove pay- ment limitations on producers who have suffered “extraordinary losses” from the COVID-19 pandemic. “Still, this is just one step and much more needs to be done to address the needs facing family cow-calf producers and stockers in the CFAP details that were released today,” NCBA President Smith said.“We will continue to push Capitol Hill for additional resources for cow-calf producers, backgrounders, and all other segments of the industry who may not sufficiently benefit from the program in its current form.” SICK COUNTRY, SICK CATTLE MARKETS Continued from page 13 Jumping at the chance to revive the call for Mandatory Coun- try of Origin Labeling (M-COOL) as an answer to COVID-19-torn beef prices, R-CALF boosted its goal for a government-ordered COOL. It started a petition for anyone to sign to support M-COOL. By May 15, the petition had more than 375,000 signatures. The biggest complaints were against Canadian and Mexican cattle entering the United States. The plan sounds good on the surface, but M-COOL failed to provide strong benefits to cattlemen, says Ross Wilson, Texas Cattle Feeders Association CEO. It was also in violation of World Trade Organization (WTO) statutes. In December 2015, WTO authorized Canada and Mexico to assess more than $1 billion in retaliatory tariffs on U.S. prod- ucts, closing the long-running dispute over the M-COOL rule. Don Close, vice president at Rabobank in St. Louis, says that ruling remains an open case. “In the event the U.S. was to take steps to reintroduce M-COOL, they could reset the tariffs that were imposed against the U.S,” Close says. “The last thing that’s needed in this period of extreme market stress is to reintroduce additional inefficiencies to the marketplace.” “As we’ve learned time and time again, increasing the govern- ment’s involvement in our day-to-day operations with a manda- tory label would prove disastrous and ineffective,” Wilson says, “during a time when the entire country, especially the cattle industry, is facing unprecedented and extraordinarily difficult times due to the COVID-19 pandemic.” “M-COOL was expensive to the marketplace,” adds Close. “It brought unfair discounts to the Mexican and Canadian cattle, it added handling costs to the feeder and the packer and, at the end of the day, the consumer was indif- ferent.” VOLUNTARY COOL NCBA, TCFA and many other cattle associations support voluntary COOL. Numerous third-party traceability programs enable producers and feeders to voluntarily document COOL. These programs help them garner price premiums for their carcass quality, both domestically and in growing foreign markets. In 2019, beef exports to Mexico and Canada added more than $65 in value per animal. “This added value would no longer exist had mandatory COOL not been repealed,” Wilson says. “Tariffs imposed by Mexico and Canada would have translated into unnecessarily higher prices for consumers and lower prices for producers.” “Exports not only add value to our product, but they create jobs,” Wilson says, citing USDA’s Economic Research Service report that for every $1 billion in agricultural exports, 7,500 jobs were required. “Simply put, mandatory COOL costs valu- able American jobs.”  IS M-COOL BACK ON THE TABLE? Packer capacity improving “America’s Indispensable Industry” – that’s what Glenn Tonsor and Jason Lusk, Purdue University food and agri- cultural economist, call the meatpacking industry. That was magnified when pro- cessing chains slowed or stopped when workers got sick. There were no shortages of beef, but when consumers stormed grocery meat counters in a panic, shelves were thinned. In a May 7 meatpacking closure update, Lusk said that on March 12, cattle slaughter numbers were about 15 percent higher than the same period in 2019. That was when COVID-19 was still emerging. By April 13, the num- bers were about 20 percent below 2019 levels. On April 18, the numbers leveled off at 40 percent below 2019. They started regaining ground about April Rabobank’s Don Close says M-COOL doesn’t work and will mean high tariffs from Mexico and Canada. 30 and returned to 30 percent below by May 7. By mid-May, slaughter numbers were back to nearly 500,000, up by nearly 50,000 from the previous week. With a workforce that’s predomi- nantly different ethnicities, in which large numbers of people ride a bus to work together and/or live in one house- hold, the coronavirus spread quickly. As an example, the Tyson plant in Ama- rillo has about 3,500 employees. When the CDC and Texas Military Guard conducted mass testing in early May, infection rates were astounding. The Amarillo Public Health Depart- ment reported May 18 that 1,500 Tyson employees had tested positive for COVID-19. The JBS plant, about 60 miles north of Amarillo at Cactus in Moore County, was scheduled to conduct mass testing