The National Pork Producers Council plans to have a legislative proposal ready next week calling for mandatory price reporting by pork plants.  It’s separate from a beef industry bill.  Beef interests have achieved consensus on boxed beef and export mandatory price reporting and are near consensus on live cattle reporting.

For the pork industry, the plan calls for slaughterhouses to submit daily purchase information to USDA.  Copies of weekly purchase contracts by packers who kill more than 1,250 hogs a week would be kept on file at USDA.  USDA would publish monthly retail sales of meat products and issue a hogs and pigs inventory monthly, not quarterly as it does now.

The cattle and beef industries plan legislative language that would provide for complete mandatory reporting of prices and terms of trade for all cattle purchased for slaughter.  Cattle market reports would reflect cattle purchased in the domestic and export markets.  Prices, volumes and terms of trade for all cattle purchased on the spot market would be reported twice a day by packers to USDA.

Packers would be required to report the negotiated price and volume for each lot of boxes sold by cut for all trade and trim specifications and meat sold on branded programs.  The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association would analyze the effectiveness of the existing price reporting system and develop recommendations to further move the industry towards a value-based reporting system.

For import-export reporting, USDA would have to publish a regulation for mandatory reporting of meat sales and shipments into export and be mandated to develop a centralized on-line system for issuing and reporting export certificates for all meat and meat products comparable to the system now in use in Canada.