MCOOL: What are the implications?

Mike Pearson talks with Dr. Nevil Speer, a columnist for BEEF and Feedstuffs covering all aspects of the cattle business. On this segment of “This Week in Agribusiness,” he breaks down mandatory country-of-origin labeling, or MCOOL, which has been coming up in discussions recently.

Speer said MCOOL is a law that would apply to retail beef sales and would require every product to bear some indication of its source country. This would apply to ground product and also whole muscle cuts.

The idea is that consumers could go to the meat case at the grocery store and know right away which product is made in the U.S., if another is from Argentina and so on. The premise, he said, is that providing customers with more information will help them in making purchasing decisions.

MCOOL is not the law currently, but the U.S. did have it before, from 2009 to 2015. Nevil lays out the implications of bringing back MCOOL – the concerns about putting more laws on the cattle industry, the costs, the benefits and whether consumers really care. Tune in here to listen to the full conversation.