The general manager of Manitoba Pork is warning the U.S. to be prepared for retaliation if reforms are not made to Mandatory Country of Origin Labelling.
In October the World Trade Organization compliance panel determined changes to U.S. Mandatory Country of Origin Labelling in May 2013 failed to bring the law into compliance with U.S. international trade obligations and last month the U.S. filed its appeal of that ruling.
Andrew Dickson, the general manager of Manitoba Pork, acknowledges while disappointing it was fully anticipated that the Americans would utilize every avenue open to them to delay making a decision on reforming the regulations.
Andrew Dickson-Manitoba Pork:
We fully expect this appeal of the compliance panel's report that came out in October that the appeal body will probably, well hopefully, turn their complaint down and we'll be sitting in the situation probably late spring, early summer at some point where we're looking at do we start applying for retaliatory measures.
We have friends in the United States who are fully supportive of Canada and Mexico's position in this matter and we're talking about very major organizations representing producers and processors and here we are.
We're still going through a legal process in the halls of the World Trade Organization in Geneva.
This is a matter that should be solved.
The U.S. Congress will now have to deal with this and that will take us two or three months while they get acquainted with the issue and hopefully someone will take the lead on this thing and get it resolved before we have to get to retaliatory measures.
Dickson says everybody should pay attention to the news releases that have been coming out from the federal government of Canada over the past year indicating their full intention of moving to retaliatory measures if the United States doesn't change the regulations on Country of Origin Labelling.
Source: Farmscape