By Bruce Cochrane
The U.S. based National Pork Producers Council says the only option left for the United States to avoid the imposition of retaliatory tariffs by Canada and Mexico is the repeal of Mandatory Country of Origin Labelling.
The World Trade Organization has approved requests from Canada and Mexico to seek authority to impose well over $1,000,000,000 in retaliatory tariffs on products imported from the United States in response to the hurt that has been caused by U.S. Mandatory Country of Origin Labelling.
Dave Warner, the director of communications with the National Pork Producers Council, says tariffs are now imminent and the only option left is for the United States to repeal provisions pertaining to beef and pork.
Dave Warner-National Pork Producers Council:
Tariffs will be put on a host of U.S. products.
We're not sure which ones.
We do know that Canada had a preliminary retaliation list put together more than several months ago and it included beef and pork but it also included a lot of non-agricultural products.
This is something that could affect the entire U.S. economy, every sector of the U.S. economy and the implications are that this would be very bad for the U.S. economy, for U.S. businesses and U.S. consumers and, quite frankly, there may be a even a little bit of pain in Mexico in Canada so this is not something that Canada and Mexico want to do.
They don't want to put these tariffs on U.S. products.
We're talking about 3 countries that do an awful lot of trading with each other.
Canada and Mexico are the United States' number 1 and number 2 export markets so this is going to hurt everyone and we need to avoid this retaliation.
Warner stresses the message has to be that the United States must act now to avoid retaliation and nothing short of repeal of the meat labelling provisions of Country of Origin Labelling is going to satisfy Canada and Mexico.
Source: Farmscape