Salon: Just where did that fishy in the window come from?

[khaosworks]

The mystery-meat lobby bites back
Slapping country-of-origin labels on food products would benefit the global environment as well as American producers. So why did Congress just gut the new labeling bill?
By Katharine Mieszkowski

July 17, 2003 - From the mid-1980s onward, conservationists and marine biologists spent a decade lobbying for a law requiring U.S. shrimp trawlers to use sea turtle excluder devices.

Since prawns are small, the nets that harvest the diminutive critters also entrap tons of other sea creatures, gobbling up about four pounds of "by-catch" marine life for every one pound of shrimp.

The conservationists were successful. Since 1994, U.S. shrimpers have had no choice but to employ turtle-saving devices that allow the endangered reptiles to avoid becoming collateral damage on the way to meeting human demand for shrimp salad and shrimp-fried rice.

But this happy tale of turtle-liberation, brought to you by the wonders of shrimping technology and government regulation, has a hidden catch: $3 billion worth of the shrimp consumed annually in the U.S. is imported from elsewhere around the world, according to the National Marine Fisheries Service.

And that shrimp, produced by lower-cost labor and often without regard for the environment, is generally cheaper than fished-in-the-U.S.A. shrimp.

It's a classic globalization dilemma. A global market for seafood means that consumers in the U.S. have access to fish and shrimp from all over the world, and benefit from the low prices generated by fierce competition. But American producers get squeezed by that competition, and American consumers have no way to know whether each popcorn-fried nibble is a murderous attack on sea turtles or is instead blessed by environmentally sustainable good karma.

That's because no amount of public education by conservation groups like Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch and Seafood Choices Alliance, about the declining state of the world's oceans, can answer this question when you go to the grocery store: Where did that fishy in the window come from?

This is an example of how a law can get gutted. In the same way that TIA is going to die because of lack of funding (a good thing) despite the fact that the laws establishing the program is on the books, the 2002 Farm Bill which Bush signed into law mandating that distributors of meat slap country-of-origin tags on their products is going to die from lack of funding. Read the article, stay informed, inform your Congress Critter that you, as a consumer, would like to have a little less mystery with your meat.

The battle doesn't end when the bill is passed. Lesson in civics to keep in mind.