COOL rules advancing

While regulations on seafood have long required sellers to note the country of origin of their products, that hasn't been the case for beef- until recently. Now, in response to WTO sanction, new rules are taking effect. I first saw this on Google News, which linked to this editorial at cattlenetwork.com that contradicts itself by arguing that the labels don't matter since people don't care when they shop, but then goes on to talk about $1 billion of lost sales. To be fair, part of the lost sales are due to higher prices: when products need to be more carefully tracked, that's expensive, and those higher prices will go on to the consumer. It's easy to say that it'd be nice to know where products come from, but how much is that information worth? Not too much to me....