Want to know what country is producing your food? Your duly elected representatives say you can. But anonymous foreign officials you never voted for say you can’t.

The U.S. must repeal a consumer protection law requiring the labeling of imported meat or face $1 billion in retaliatory sanctions from Canada and Mexico, the World Trade Organization said on Monday.

The incident vindicates fears among free trade skeptics that U.S. participation in the global trading system threatens to undermine national sovereignty by allowing democratically passed laws to be struck down by international bureaucrats and unelected tribunals.

A WTO dispute arbitrator found that the U.S.’s mandatory country of origin labeling (COOL) rules, which require imported beef products to be labeled with the country in which the animals were raised and slaughtered, violated a WTO rule stipulating that imported and locally produced goods be treated equally.

The arbitrator ruled that the Canadian and Mexican meat industries had been harmed by COOL to the effect of $1 billion since 2008 and opened the door for both governments to begin implementing retaliatory tariffs for that same amount against U.S. agricultural products starting in mid-December.

To avert the sanctions, Congress must pass a full repeal of COOL. The House passed a repeal last summer; the Senate is now working on its own version.

“If the Senate does not act, U.S. beef exports will face a 100 percent tariff in these countries, severely diminishing about $2 billion of beef exports annually,” said Philip Ellis, president of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association.

Canadian and Mexican farmers emphasized that full repeal of COOL is the only acceptable resolution to the problem.

“Our patience is exhausted. There is no further negotiation to be done and no compromise is acceptable. Canadian livestock producers and meat processors expect the U.S. to do nothing less than repeal COOL or face the immediate imposition of retaliatory tariffs on U.S. goods to the same extent as the damage we have endured,” a group of Canadian livestock producers said in a statement.

The ruling affirms concerns that as the U.S. becomes more connected to other countries via free trade agreements and under the WTO, domestic priorities and the democratic process are taking a backseat to rules that are negotiated and adjudicated largely in secret.

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“Today’s ruling makes clear that trade agreements can — and do — threaten even the most favored U.S. consumer protections,” said Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, a liberal consumer advocacy group, noting that COOL had enjoyed support among as much as 92 percent of the American public.

Last spring, Obama pushed back against critics clamoring that his proposed trade agreements would undermine American rules and regulations.

“They’re making this stuff up. No trade agreement is going to force us to change our laws,” the president said at the Nike headquarters in Oregon.

Wallach hopes that Obama was not making that statement tongue in cheek.

“We hope that President Obama stands by his claim that ‘no trade agreement is going to force us to change our laws,’ but in fact rolling back U.S. consumer and environmental safeguards has been exactly what past presidents have done after previous retrograde trade pact rulings,” she said.

Such sovereignty concerns have been a major point of contention across the political spectrum with regard to the recently completed Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, whose text has been finalized but Congress has yet to bring it to a vote.

In particular, a chapter in the agreement that allows foreign corporations to sue sovereign governments for violating the TPP has been met with fierce opposition.

This is not the first time the WTO has found U.S. law to be in violation of its nondiscrimination and national treatment requirements. The U.S. has had to roll back gasoline cleanliness regulations, fuel efficiency standards for cars, and rules on shrimping intended to help protect sea turtles after other countries challenged the laws at the WTO’s Dispute Settlement Body.