James M. Talent: “This is from IBP. They are packers. They are reporting what their major retail customers are notifying them that they…”

“This is from IBP. They are packers. They are reporting what their major retail customers are notifying them that they have to do. Here is what the retail customers want us to do. I quote: Stick all covered commodities with country of origin information that complies with the law and USDA regulations. Provide enough signage to ensure one sign for each retail display in every shipment of product that cannot bear a label. Contract to maintain records and a verifiable audit trail to establish the accuracy of the country of origin information that retailers receive from packers for covered commodities. I will not read the whole letter. But suffice it to say, the major retailers are going to reorganize their inventory and distribution lines so they can keep separate these different kinds of beef. That is going to generate cost. They are going to require that as much beef as possible be prepackaged. This is interesting. It may result, unfortunately, in their laying off some meat cutters and people on the premises of the store who have been cutting meat fresh there. They are going to get it prepackaged because then they have to do as little as possible at the store. That may tend to encourage vertical integration in the production chain, which is the opposite of what we want. They are going to set up an audit system and require packers to have software and other kinds of records that will network into the retailers systems so they can trace back.…”