There’s plenty of criticism flying around about the new farm bill. It spends unprecedented amounts of money to prop up one of the most successful industries in the country. It uses Soviet-style central planning to maintain food prices and make rich farmers richer. Its commodity programs distort trade in violation of global trade rules. 

But this year’s the farm bill had the potential to mitigate some these sins by repealing a number of high-profile protectionist regulations. Despite a few close calls, however, the final version of the bill kept these programs in place, exposing the United States to possible retaliation.

COOL

One of those programs is the mandatory country-of-origin labeling (COOL) law. This requirement was first imposed by the 2002 farm bill. Ostensibly designed to increase consumer awareness, the true impact of the program is to push foreign-born cattle out of the market. The law requires meat packers to keep track of, and process separately, cattle that was born and/or raised for some time in Canada. The added expense benefits a portion of U.S. cattle ranchers at the expense of meat industry as a whole.

The negative impact on the Canadian and Mexican cattle industries was enough to prompt a complaint at the WTO. After the United States lost that case, the administration amended the regulation. But the new regulation, rather than bringing the United States into compliance, actually makes the law even more protectionist. Canada has made clear its intention to impose barriers on a wide range of U.S. products in retaliation.

Repealing this disastrous regulation through the farm bill was discussed during numerous stages of the legislative process, but no language on COOL was ever added to the bill.

Catfish

Another program that could have been fixed by the farm bill was a bizarrely redundant and purely unnecessary catfish inspection regime. The new system would cost an estimated $14 million per year to administer and (by the USDA’s own admission) do nothing to improve the safety of catfish. However, the new institutional requirements imposed on catfish farmers to comply with the new regime would all but eliminate Vietnamese competitors from the market. The U.S. catfish industry and their allies in Congress are all for it.

Even though both house of Congress had at one point or another passed bills that repealed the new catfish regime, the final bill that came out of conference kept the redundant system in place.

The inspection issue has complicated negotiation of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, of which Vietnam will be a member, and could become the basis of a complaint at the World Trade Organization. 

In the words of Sen. Mike Lee, the farm bill is “a monument to Washington dysfunction, and an insult to taxpayers, consumers, and citizens.”  It is also the most popular vehicle for imposing protectionist regulations that serve a small set of businesses at the expense of the national economy. 

There was hope that this bill could roll back some of the damage done in the past, at least for a handful of odious regulations. That hope was sorely misplaced.