WASHINGTON, Jan. 13, 2016 - USDA will review a contract
between the National Pork Board (NPB) and the National Pork Producers Council (NPPC)
which pays NPPC $3 million per year for use of their trademark.
In an agreement
filed in federal court Dec. 23, the department agreed to review the contract
and make a decision by May 2 on the value of the now-discontinued slogan, “Pork:
The Other White Meat.”
Under the agreement, the Humane Society of the
United States, which sued over the contract in 2012, agreed not to seek an
order requiring NPPC to return money it has already received under the
contract.
HSUS contends that the Pork Board, which used producers’
pork checkoff funds to develop the marketing campaign, made a “sweetheart” deal
10 years ago to sell the slogan to the NPPC in order to keep NPPC in business.
HSUS argues that the purchase price of $60 million,
which comes from producer-generated checkoff funds and is doled out at $3
million per year, is then used to fund NPPC lobbying efforts that run contrary
to the goals of HSUS, which advocates for more humane treatment of farm
animals. The next payment is due in July.
The board was established by the 1985 farm bill and
is responsible for deciding how to spend the money raised from pork producers
for research and promotion purposes.
NPPC claimed that it owned the trademark for “Pork:
The Other White Meat,” a slogan that was abandoned in 2011 in favor of “Pork:
Be Inspired.”
Between 1987 and 2006, when the purchase was being
negotiated, the Board had already spent
$500 million in checkoff funds promoting the “Other White
Meat” in its advertising programs, HSUS said in its 2012 complaint. Every
national campaign involving the trademarked slogan, from its inception, “was
funded entirely by mandatory checkoff assessments collected from pork
producers,” HSUS said.
In the first round of the litigation, U.S. District Judge
Amy Berman Jackson ruled
that HSUS, Iowa pig farmer Harvey Dillenburg and the Iowa Citizens for
Community Improvement did not have standing to pursue the matter. But the D.C.
Circuit Court of Appeals reversed
that decision in August, finding that Dillenburg does have standing. The court
said that because it found standing for Dillenburg, it did not have to examine
whether HSUS and ICCI did.
“Any honest review of this illegal use of pork
check-off money by a private trade association will show that there’s
some funny math going on in Washington, D.C.,” HSUS CEO Wayne Pacelle said in a
blog
post.
“If the new valuation determines that the retired slogan
isn’t worth the tens of millions of dollars that constitute the balance of
payments on the contract, then the annual payments to NPPC will have to
cease, or at least be drastically scaled back.”
NPPC spokesman Dave Warner said the council would not
have any comment. “We’re part of the equation, but we’re staying out of it,” he
said.
But in a release issued in 2013, then NPPC President
Randy Spronk described the case as “clearly a vendetta against the U.S. pork
industry by the leadership of HSUS, which has made their mission to permanently
end animal agriculture.”
NPPC tried to intervene in the case, but Judge Jackson
rejected its motion last month. She said she had “questions about the
timeliness of the motion to intervene, which was filed more than three years
and two months after the case was filed and after settlement negotiations were
already under way.” But Jackson also said that NPPC could submit any materials
to USDA by Feb. 15, and that USDA “shall consider those materials as part of
(its) review.”
#30
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