Beef Import Plan Draws Rancher Criticism As Processing Changes Are Proposed

By Bob Bragg

For most of last week, U.S. cattle producers have questioned Donald Trump’s scheme to reduce beef prices for U.S. consumers by importing 300 metric tons of beef trimmings to be turned into ground beef from some unknown country without tariffs and a 25% price reduction.

It is no surprise that this scheme isn’t setting well with U.S. cattle producers. Ranchers and even some Republicans have criticized this plan, arguing it will harm beef producers. For example, during the time when producers were beginning to send their feeder cattle to markets, prices dropped more than $10 per hundredweight, meaning that the value of a 500-pound steer had lost $50 or more in less than two weeks. But Trump and his team have a new plan to make producers happy. He proposed regulation changes to allow beef producers to slaughter and market meat from their own animals, which isn’t exactly a new idea, because Colorado and a few other states already allow producers to market farm raised meat within the boundaries of the state where they were processed. The main drawback with such a plan is that most producers have their hands full just keeping their cattle operations going. If they want to set up a slaughter facility, they must follow specific guidelines about how a facility is designed and operated to ensure that sanitary regulations are followed. Most farms and ranches barely have enough labor to keep the production operations going let alone sustaining a slaughter facility. Another drawback is that in the states that allow producers to process animals they raise, they can't market their meat products across state lines.

Trump’s plan to reduce restrictions on meat processing has brought to my mind the 1906 Upton Sinclair novel, The Jungle, that exposed the unsanitary and exploitative conditions in meat packing plants at the turn of the 1900s in the U.S. The novel encouraged President Theodore Roosevelt to push for reforms to the meat packing industry and the passage of the Pure Food and Drug and the Meat Inspection acts of 1906. We shouldn’t return to those dark days when poor conditions in slaughter plants led to both workers and consumers suffering harm caused by these bad practices.