Each Year R-CALF USA Revisits its Member Driven Priorities

In 2015, R-CALF USA will continue fighting to ensure that U.S. cattle and sheep producers do not succumb to supply-chain capture, which multinational protein packers are aggressively attempting to do in the cattle and sheep industries just as they have already done in the poultry and hog industries through the process of vertical integration. To accomplish this, R-CALF USA will:

Defend the right of ranchers to remain competitive in their domestic market by preserving country of origin labeling (COOL).

Defend the right of ranchers to market their livestock into a competitive marketplace that is free from abuses and distortions resulting from the unrestrained market power of the dominant protein packers by reauthorizing critical rulemakings under the Packers and Stockyards Act.

Defend the right of ranchers to preserve their industry’s ultimate price-discovery market – the fed cattle cash market – which is a demonstrably superior price-discovery tool than is the ultra-thin futures market, by fighting to ban the practices dominant protein packers are using to shrink the fed cattle cash market to only 3 percent in some regions and to only 23 percent nationally.

Defend the right of ranchers to not subsidize political organizations they may not agree with through their mandatory checkoff assessments by calling for an end to the current beef checkoff program and recommending that lobbying groups be prohibited from contracting or otherwise receiving any checkoff dollars under any new beef checkoff program.

Defend the right of ranchers to protect the health and safety of their U.S. cattle and sheep herds by prohibiting the importation of fresh meat and livestock from countries with ongoing disease problems, such as Argentina and Brazil where the foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) virus is known to exist.

Defend what is left of our beleaguered sheep industry, and prevent the cattle industry from being similarly outsourced by trade agreements that ignore the supply-sensitive nature of our domestic cattle industry by opposing fast-track trade authority (also known as Trade Promotion Authority) and by opposing the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) free trade agreements.

Defend the right of U.S. ranchers to exercise and enjoy their private property rights without restrictions by, for example, fighting to prevent the federal government from asserting new jurisdiction over the water, air and land to which their private property rights apply.

Mark your calendars for this year’s annual convention: Aug. 14-15, 2015 in Denver, Colo.

R-CALF USA is solely funded by donations and membership dues. Please consider becoming a member or giving a donation. For more info or to join, go to http://www.r-calfusa.com, 406-252-2516.