It doesn’t matter if your steak is Canadian

Viewpoint: Bloomberg View (excerpted) The latest international controversy is happening on your dinner plate. The question at issue: Do you have a right to know which country your steak came from?

In 2008, Congress began enforcing a law requiring country- of-origin labelling on meat products including pork, beef and lamb. The law was passed in 2002, just a couple of years after mad cow disease cropped up in North America, and its stated goal was to give consumers vital health information. The unstated goal was to give U.S. producers a leg up on Mexican and Canadian ranchers trying to break into the U.S. market.

Six years later, the law seems not to have had much effect on either front. What it has done is create a serious trade dispute between the U.S. and its neighbours. Twice the World Trade Organization has ruled that the labelling rules unfairly discriminate against imports. Canada, which says the rules have cost its producers nearly a billion dollars, has threatened $3 billion in retaliatory tariffs on products ranging from meat and vegetables to wine and furniture.

In 2014, the U.S. imported more than two million head of cattle from Canada and Mexico and brought in nearly five million hogs from Canada.

And consumers have little reason to like it, either. Fewer than 30 per cent of shoppers recently surveyed by Kansas State University researchers were even aware of the country labels. And for those who were, the labels’ effect on their decision-making was negligible. In any case, there’s no evidence consumers should worry that Mexican and Canadian animals are unsafe. Only four cases of mad cow disease have ever occurred in the U.S. With so little gained and so much at stake involving top U.S. trading partners, the House last month finally passed legislation to repeal the rule.

The Senate may not be so willing, given that ranching states have proportionately greater representation there. But perhaps there are grounds for compromise: Sen. Debbie Stabenow has proposed allowing domestic producers to use a “Product of the U.S.” label, while lifting the mandate on foreign products. Let’s hope Canada and Mexico would agree to that. But either way, foreign meat is no longer going be forced to call attention to itself at the butcher’s counter.