After 14 years of self-funded promotion, the nation’s swine industry has decided by a 5% vote margin that it’s tired of “Pork. The Other White Meat” and related campaigns, according to a referendum cleared by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The National Pork Producers Council has vowed to fight in court to overturn the Pork Checkoff Program referendum process and outcome. The council claims the process was tainted by illegal votes, mistakes in voter verification, other voting irregularities and confusion, and referendum mismanagement by the USDA.
“The whole thing makes Florida look like a cake-walk, and there’s not even a hanging chad,” Craig Jarolimek, the producers’ council president, told StoreAlliance.com. He’s a hog farmer near Forest River, N.D.
“It’s just been a total misfunctioning of USDA,” Jarolimek said, adding that a group including independent producers, state associations and the council is uniting to file for an injunction to overturn the decision.
The USDA denied any problems with how it conducted the referendum. But Jarolimek said more of the estimated 85,000 pork producers would have voted if not for the USDA’s mismanagement.
The referendum resulted from a dispute that divided large- and smaller-scale hog producers. Opponents, led mostly by operators of smaller farms, claimed the program benefits mostly the meat processors and larger corporate-owned farms in an increasingly consolidated industry from farm through slaughtering, processing and distribution to retailers.
“This was not only a referendum by hog farmers on the mandatory pork checkoff, but it was a referendum on the livestock industry and for that matter, American agriculture,” Missouri farmer and opposition leader Rhonda Perry told The Associated Press.
The pork council and the trade’s own promotion, education, research and related programs are threatened by the 1,555-vote margin that defeated the referendum. Last year the ongoing mandatory checkoff fees assessed on sales by producers and importers came to about $54 million to finance the programs, including 92 percent of the council’s budget.
“It puts a lot of those things in jeopardy,” checkoff backer Jarolimek said Friday by phone from his farm.
Included is the popular and critically acclaimed “Pork. The Other White Meat.” advertising and merchandising campaign, which has been credited with halting and perhaps even reversing a slide in U.S. pork consumption since the early 1980s.
But opponents claimed the ad campaigns, which also included the earlier “America’s Leaning on Pork” promotion, did little to boost pork demand and consumption or hog prices.
The government estimates that U.S. pork consumption was 66.5 pounds per person last year, or about the same as when the checkoff program was created in the mid-1980s. But the rate had declined in the intervening years as poultry consumption rose dramatically. The mandatory checkoff fee is 45 cents per $100 of a pig or hog`s value when sold.
The USDA’s Office of Inspector General defended the USDA’s management of the checkoff referendum, saying the agency controlled the process and that “we found no evidence that the controls did not work” as intended. “Thus, we have no basis for further inquiry,” the agency’s chief law enforcment officer said.
Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman announced Jan. 11 that all votes from last year’s producers referendum had been tallied and the program was rejected, 15,951-14,396. The balloting was conducted between Aug. 18 and Sept. 21.
Glickman said that he would direct USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service to prepare and issue a final rule to terminate the program.
“This outcome demonstrates that the Pork Checkoff Program does not have the support of the producers it serves and therefore cannot fulfill its stated purpose,” Glickman said in announcing the results.
The congressionally mandated program was authorized by the Pork Promotion, Research, and Consumer Information Act of 1985 and was initiated with the first funds being collected on sales in 1986. By 1987, the funds were being used to promote pork and finance research and education linked to pork production, nutrition, trade and related matters.
“Pork. The Other White Meat,” was named last year by Northwestern University as the fifth-most memorable tagline in contemporary advertising, says the council, which dates to 1968 under different industry funding arrangements.
The 2000 referendum was the first time pork producers had the opportunity to vote on the issue since producers initially voted to approve the program in 1985.
The nation’s beef producers may be put to the same referendum test on their own checkoff program. A petition challenging it has been mounted calling for a vote.
The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association said that it “sympathizes with pork producers, who have lost a major weapon in their fight to maintain consumer demand for pork. At the same time, we will continue to support beef industry checkoff-funded efforts to increase beef demand, which over the past two years have turned the demand tide and given producers new hope for their operations and their industry.”
The beef group said it expects the USDA to conduct “a thorough and professional validation of the beef checkoff petition.”
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The USDA also supervises promotion programs for milk and dairy products, watermelons, honey, popcorn, potatoes, peanuts, mushrooms, cotton and eggs. Programs for pecans, fresh flowers and wheat have been abolished.
By Worth Wren Jr.
StoreAlliance.com staff writer
