To the editor: The current debate in Congress is not about overriding California’s voters (“China-backed Big Pork wants to override 63% of California voters. Even conservatives are mad,” March 12). It is about Congress exercising the authority expressly assigned to it in the Constitution when state rules reshape interstate commerce.
California is entitled to govern California. It may regulate farms within its borders and set standards for California producers. The question for Congress is whether a state may use the size of its market to impose rules on farms beyond its borders by conditioning market access on production practices that occurred months earlier outside the state. That is precisely the kind of interstate conflict the Constitution assigns to Congress.
Proposition 12 produces a strange legal result. A pig raised in Iowa or Minnesota can produce pork products that California law treats as both legal and illegal, depending only on how the product is processed or where it is sold. It is the same animal from the same farm, yet California assigns different legal classifications to the final products.
The Supreme Court’s decision in National Pork Producers Council vs. Ross did not resolve this issue in California’s favor. Instead, the court pointed to Congress as the institution with authority to address interstate market conflicts.
The economic record complicates the claim that Proposition 12 benefits smaller farms. Compliance costs are capital-intensive; smaller breeding operations have exited production at higher rates, and Californians have seen higher prices in the meat case. The “China” rhetoric obscures the reality that congressional action has bipartisan support from federal and state officials and hundreds of American farm organizations.
If one state may impose upstream production standards on the rest of the country, there is no limiting principle.
In the United States, states’ rights end where national markets begin.
Andy Curliss, Des Moines, Iowa
This writer is the chairman of the Carver Center for Agriculture & Nutrition, an affordability and nutrition nonprofit.
