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File photo of Karl Kynoch 

The Chair of Manitoba Pork Council is not surprised, but disappointed the U.S. government has decided to appeal a decision by a WTO trade dispute panel regarding Country Of Origin Labelling.

In November 2011a WTO dispute panel ruled unanimously in Canada's favour, saying the American policy discriminates against Canadian livestock. At that point the industry had begun looking forward to returning to a pre-COOL marketing environment, but that will now be delayed for a considerable length of time.

"We were down doing trade advocacy in the U.S. just in January, and producers in the U.S. were urging them (U.S. government) to move forward to resolve this," says Kynoch. "We were hoping with that producer encouragement in the U.S. that maybe they wouldn't appeal it."

Kynoch feels this was a politically motivated decision.

"When you have elections coming up, governments like to get rid of issues like this, or at least push them off so they don't become election issues," says Kynoch. "At the end of the day it simply is going to drag it out, and it will be that much longer in getting this resolved."

Kynoch notes the industry was preparing to return to a non-COOL trading environment.

"When we were in the U.S., the U.S. producers were looking to buy baby pigs out of Canada, they are looking to restore those relationships and there are producers up here that would like to do that to," says Kynoch. "It has taken quite a while for them to put the appeal in, which again shows you they are trying to drag it out."

The implementation of COOL has cost the livestock sector hundreds of millions of dollars, according to the Canadian Cattlemen's Association and Canadian Pork Council. Weanling exporters in Manitoba were among the producers most severely affected.



"We lost about a third of the weanling exports, we had quite a few direct for slaughters going down and that market we lost about 90% of," says Kynoch. "The other disadvantage was we lost access to other markets for producers."

Kynoch tells us the appeal process will take three months, and is confident the original ruling will be upheld. He adds there is then a period of time when the U.S. government can make changes to COOL in order to reduce damages, so we are still a long way from putting this issue to rest.