GIPSA issued the rule on June 22. A public comment period on it ends Nov. 22. Prompted by the 2008 Farm Bill, the rule would amend the Packers and Stockyards Act (PSA), which regulates livestock and poultry contracts and marketing practices.
NPPC, which has called the regulation a “bureaucratic overreach,” said in its comments that GIPSA lacked authority to, for example, declare that no showing of injury to competition is necessary to establish a violation of the PSA. It added that federal courts have uniformly rejected that view and that Congress rejected a similar provision during debate on the 2008 Farm Bill.
NPPC also pointed out the rule was offered with no meaningful analysis of its impact on the pork industry. NPPC, along with the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, National Meat Association and National Turkey Federation, released an economic analysis of the GIPSA rule last week that found it would result in nearly 23,000 lost jobs and reduce gross domestic product by $1.56 billion. The cost to the pork industry would be $333 million annually after an initial $69 million expense.
“In all my years in the pork industry, I have never seen a regulation proposed that would do as much harm to America’s pork producers as the GIPSA rule would do,” said Neil Dierks, NPPC CEO. “There’s no justification for imposing this rule on pork producers. It’s based on anecdotes, not analyses.”
NPPC requested GIPSA to withdraw the portions of the proposed rule that will have an immediate and detrimental impact on the pork industry. It also asked for a thorough analysis of the affect on the pork producers of any new regulation.
“As proposed, the GIPSA rule is bad for farmers and ranchers, bad for consumers and bad for rural America,” said Sam Carney, NPPC president and a pork producer from Adair, Iowa. “We’d like the agency to rewrite the rule, sticking to the mandates Congress gave it in the 2008 Farm Bill.”
