Farmscape for June 13, 2017

The National Pork Producers Council has renewed its call for the Trump administration to withdraw the GIPSA rule, a regulation related to the buying and selling of livestock in the United States.
The National Pork Producers Council, in comments submitted yesterday on an interim final rule of the Farmer Fair Practices Rules, drafted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Grain Inspection, Packers and Stockyards Administration, urged USDA to withdraw a regulation related to the buying and selling of livestock.
The interim final rule is set to become effective Oct. 19.
Dustin Baker, the Deputy Director Economics and Domestic Production with the National Pork Producers Council, notes the Trump administration has twice delayed the implementation of the interim final rule which is promising but the industry is not yet out of the woods.

Clip-Dustin Baker-National Pork Producers Council:
The interim final rule would broaden the scope of the Packers and Stockyards Act of 1921 related to the use of unfair, unjustly discriminatory, deceptive practices and undue or unreasonable preferences and advantages and so the regulation would deem these actions violations of federal law even if they didn’t harm competition or cause competitive injury so essentially it would lower the threshold at which a producer could bring a lawsuit against a packer.
In order to address these concerns we commissioned some studies to see what the economic impact of these rules would be.
An Informa Economics study conducted in 2016 showed that these rules would cost a pork producer more than four dollars per pig.
By giving this gift to trial lawyers in the form of GIPSA rules packers will be adjusting to limit their liabilities in the market place and, as a result, they'll own more of their own pigs which would ultimately reduce competition.

Baker suggests these rules are a solution in search of a problem that just doesn't exist in the pork industry.
He says moving forward the hope is the Trump administration will withdraw the interim final rule.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

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