Country of Origin Labeling Amendments Act of 2015

Floor Speech

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Mr. THOMPSON of California. I thank the gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Peterson) for yielding and for all of his work on this issue. He has been great at trying to mitigate the problems.

Mr. Speaker, I rise as a strong supporter of the idea of country of origin labeling, and I think it is a good idea.

I refute what some have said, that there is no benefit to this. There is great benefit to this. Area of origin labeling allows people to get to know from where their food comes, and that is, I think, incredibly important.

I don't think that repeal is the number one preference here. I don't think that is what we should be doing; we should be fixing the problem, but, because the majority hasn't been willing to work to fix the problem, we are in a real catch-22.

I rise today in support of this bill because, if it is not repealed, we are going to face tremendous retaliatory acts from both Mexico and Canada, and these are going to be of great fiscal impact to our economy.

My home State of California, for instance, it is estimated that we will be hit by $1.8 billion worth of retaliatory action. A good part of that comes from my home industry, the wine community; they will be hit heavily. We know what happens. We have seen this movie before, and the end is not good.

When Congress put in place the trucking program to deal with the Mexican trucking problems, we were sued. The wine industry was hit with retaliatory actions, and we saw a 25 percent reduction in our business. That was financially devastating not only to California, but this is an industry that puts $160 billion a year into the national economy. This hurt us all. That was bad enough, but it took us 3 years to get back that market share that we had lost.

It is important that we repeal this and then get on to fixing it right away. I ask that we vote in favor of this bill today.

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