Editorial
NCBA Positions On Disclosure,
Checkoff And Labeling Conflict

By Steve Kelton

The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association won one and lost one on Capitol Hill last week. The Senate voted to include a meat labeling amendment the group supports in its version of the agriculture appropriations bill, but Senators also approved a price disclosure amendment the organization opposes.

The NCBA-favored provision would require labeling of all imported muscle meat products at the retail level, a move that supporters believe would encourage consumers to buy domestic product. Backers included a wide array of producer groups, including those at odds with NCBA over other policies.

One of those "other policies" was the accompanying price disclosure amendment. It would direct USDA to implement a three-year pilot project requiring reporting of livestock and meat sales and prohibiting some pricing arrangements which restrict competitive bidding.

Neither provision is included in the House version of the ag funding bill, meaning they may or may not survive the conference committee process in which differences are resolved. The labeling amendment, with its broad industry backing, faces better odds than the disclosure provision, which is naturally expected to generate intense lobbying pressure from packer interests.

A number of producer groups will attempt to counter that pressure, but to prevail they will have to overcome opposition from NCBA as well.

In a dichotomy that must be ticklish for its lobbyists to explain, NCBA insists it is appropriate, even essential, for the federal government to mandate and oversee the collection of a dollar a head on every bovine trade made in the United States. On the other hand, it insists with equal intensity, the government has no business knowing the price of those cattle.

Private business transactions should remain private, the group maintains, a view shared by packers whose manipulation of the fed cattle market the disclosure provision is intended to curb. That leave-us-be attitude is hard to argue with in the abstract, particularly for members of an industry that has traditionally shunned government interference.

Much the same argument was doubtless tendered decades ago, however, when an earlier Congress was debating what would become the Securities and Exchange Commission. Today no sane investor would dream of risking serious money in an unregulated stock market where insider tips and secret deals were considered the norm and everyone outside the club simply a fleece to be shorn.

Passionate denials on the part of the processing sector and an admirable preference for laissez-faire economics among cattlemen notwithstanding, that is precisely the situation in which most cattle producers find themselves — staring through the barred gates of a private club where a handful of members write the rules, set the odds, and parcel out the rewards, scant as they may be.

The details of the Senate proposal, should it prevail, are still to be written, and there is much room for concern about just what would emerge from an administration that has proven itself for rent to the highest bidder. There can be no doubt, however, that the current market for fat cattle is anything but fair and open.

How could it be when 40 percent of fed cattle in the Texas Panhandle, 53 percent of those in Kansas and more than 70 percent of those in Colorado are traded off the market, as they were the week before last? And those were just the numbers reported voluntarily; with no current provision for disclosure, no one can really have confidence that those figures, disturbing as they are, haven’t been watered down.

Whatever comes of the Senate plan, it in no way mandates nor authorizes the federal government to establish cattle prices, just to determine what they really are and to report them. To open the closet and let in the light.

The line between privacy and secrecy can be hard to discern, but it’s clear that the cattle business long ago crossed it, and this is no longer a battle over protecting the former, but preserving the latter. That is defensible when the issue is national security or the formula for Coca-Cola. When it comes to the price of live cattle, however, an obsession with secrecy can only mean someone has something to hide.

If a return to true laissez-faire economics is what opponents of price disclosure are seeking, we’d best water out and leave the house before daylight, because we’ve got a lot of backtrailing to do. We can cover the first ground in a hurry because it’s well marked by a variety of familiar signs such as imported meat labeling and mandatory promotions checkoffs. Somewhere far beyond that we’ll have to get down and start reading tracks.