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Last week talks convened in Billings, Montana on how the livestock industry has been affected by NAFTA, in anticipation of Obama’s first visit to Canada to meet with Prime Minister Harper. Representatives of consumer groups and livestock producer organizations from Canada, Mexico, and the United States met to address the challenges faced by family farmers and ranchers from trade policy and uncompetitive livestock markets.

Following the conference, the Western Organization of Research Councils released the following coverage:

A representative of a consumer group, Patty Lovera, assistant director of Food and Water Watch, said the promised benefits of expanded trade have not materialized for consumers.

“Even as prices livestock producers receive have gone steadily down, retail food prices
rarely do,” Lovera said. “So while the producer’s share of the retail food dollar continues to shrink, consumers are not spending less at the meat and dairy case.”

Dennis Olson, senior policy analyst with the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy,
said the “promises made by supporters of NAFTA have not been kept and new policies are urgently needed.” He said the groups are focusing on opportunities to work jointly on policy initiatives, such as the ban on packer ownership of livestock, that would curtail the power of global meat cartels to influence livestock markets and politics.

On behalf of the conference participants, Olson urged leaders of the United States,
Canada, and Mexico to repeal provision in NAFTA that impede the rights of all countries. Olson said these rights include:

• Establishment of domestic food and agricultural policies that provide farmers with
the cost of production without dumping commodities into other countries at below
the cost of production.
• Enforcement of antitrust laws preventing price manipulation and other anti-
competitive practices n agricultural markets.
• Setting up publicly-owned grain reserves to stabilize prices and to provide fair
prices to both farmers and consumers.
• Regulation of commodity futures markets and speculative investments.

“We commit ourselves to building an alternative food system that is designed to make
safe, affordable food a higher priority that increasing the profit margins for the global meat cartels,” Olson added.

The conference was sponsored by the National Association of Peasant Marketing
Enterprises, National Farmers Union (Canada), Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, Food and Water Watch, and the Western Organization of Resource Councils (WORC).”

The Billing Gazette reported on talks at the conference that surrounded the issue of Packer ownership or feedlots (The Grass-fed Party supports a ban on packer ownership):

Canadian Neil Peacock said his country would benefit from a labeling program similar to the U.S. one known as COOL. Peacock said they came to the NAFTA meeting, to which the Western Organization of Resource Councils, or WORC, played host, to work on beef policy.

Namely, Peacock and others said they would like to prohibit packing plants from owning the feedlots from which they buy cattle for slaughter. Feedlot owners buy young cattle from ranches and then fatten them up before selling them to slaughterhouses.

The concern about processor ownership of feedlots is that in areas of the country where processors own large feedlots, they're able to set take-it-or-leave-it prices for the cattle they buy. In the West, the concern is growing as Brazilian-based meat processor JBS SA acquires American meat processing facilities and feedlots. Last year, JBS bought feedlots in Texas, Kansas, Idaho and Colorado, which handle about 800,000 cattle at a time. Colorado feedlots are crucial to Montana's cattle industry, which exports 900,000 feeder cattle to feedlots annually for fattening.

President Barack Obama has spoken against processor ownership of feedlots. The groups gathered Friday are hopeful the United States will soon pass laws banning processor feedlot ownership.

Gilles Stockton, speaking for WORC, called on Obama to fix NAFTA and help the beef industry.

"President Obama, renegotiate NAFTA now," Stockton said. "President Obama, JBS must not be allowed to buy more U.S. packers. Stop the mergers now."

Journalist Jennifer Loven reported today on the outcome of the initial meeting between Obama and Harper yesterday:

“On trade, Obama stuck to his pledge to eventually seek changes in the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to increase enforcement of labor and environmental standards — but said he intended to do so in a way "that is not disruptive to the extraordinarily important trade relationships that exist between the United States and Canada. Harper said he might be willing to negotiate, but not by "opening the whole NAFTA and unraveling what is a very complex agreement."