How Much Beef and Poultry Does the Us Import
Chicken meat for auction at a market in Anhui province, China. VCG via Getty Images hibernate explanation
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VCG via Getty Images
Chicken meat for sale at a market in Anhui province, Prc.
VCG via Getty Images
Cooked chicken from birds grown and raised in China soon will exist headed to America — in a merchandise deal that's really about beefiness.
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross announced Thursday night that the U.S. was greenlighting Chinese chicken imports and getting U.S. beef producers access to Communist china's virtually ane.4 billion consumers. Just the bargain is raising concerns among critics who point to Red china's long history of food-safety scandals.
The Chinese ambition for beef is huge and growing, simply American beefiness producers have been locked out of that market since a case of mad cow disease cropped upwards in the U.Due south. in 2003. In response, many countries, including Southward Korea, Japan, Mexico and Mainland china, banned imports of U.Due south. beefiness.
Mainland china was the but one of those nations to not somewhen lift its ban — and that's a large deal.
"It's a very big market place; it's at least a $2.5 billion market that'due south existence opened up for U.Southward. beef," Ross said in announcing the trade deal.
Many people long had seen Prc's refusal to lift its ban on U.S. beefiness imports as a negotiating tactic, a tit for tat aimed at assuasive Chinese chicken imports into the United States. The negotiations that led to the new trade bargain take been going back and forth for more than a decade, stalled at i point past worries in Congress over Red china'south food-condom practices.
American beef producers are rejoicing that the process has finally resulted in allowing them to send beef to Red china.
"After being locked out of the globe'south largest market place for 13 years, we strongly welcome the annunciation that an agreement has been made to restore U.S. beef exports to China," Craig Uden, president of the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, said in a statement. "It'due south impossible to overstate how beneficial this will be for America's cattle producers, and the Trump administration deserves a lot of credit for getting this achieved."
The U.Southward. should be cleared to export beef to Prc past mid-July. That's also the deadline for the U.Due south. to finalize rules for the importation of cooked craven products from China. Why cooked chicken instead of raw?
"For a country to exist able to ship meat and poultry products into the U.S., they have to demonstrate that their food-safety inspection organization is equivalent to the organisation hither in the U.S.," explains Brian Ronholm, who served as deputy undersecretary for food safety at the U.S. Section of Agronomics under the Obama assistants.
"The equivalency determination process for Mainland china as it relates to processed [cooked] chicken products had been underway, and this deal expedites this process," he says. "China too is seeking equivalency for their inspection system for slaughter facilities, but that will be a longer process."
Given the many outbreaks of avian flu China has experienced, there are also worries that if raw Chinese poultry were processed in the U.S., it could potentially contaminate American plants or somehow spread to birds here in united states of america.
Tony Corbo, a senior lobbyist for the food campaign at Food & Water Watch, an environmental advocacy group, has been raising concerns about efforts to open the U.Southward. market to Chinese chicken imports for years. He questions the Chinese government's ability to enforce food-rubber standards, given its poor rail record.
That record includes rat meat being sold as lamb, oil recovered from drainage ditches in gutters being sold equally cooking oil, and babe formula contaminated with melamine that sickened hundreds of thousands of babies and killed six. In 2014, a Shanghai food-processing manufactory that supplied international eating place brands including McDonald's and KFC was caught selling stale meat, repackaged with new expiration dates.
Corbo points out that last December, Prc'due south own Nutrient and Drug Administration reported it had uncovered as many as a half-one thousand thousand cases of food-safety violations just in the first iii quarters of 2016.
That said, the USDA has gone to China to audit plants that would process the chicken to exist shipped to America. But Corbo finds little comfort in that. "You don't know from moment to moment how China is enforcing food-safety standards," Corbo says.
In contempo months, a team from the USDA'south Food Safety and Inspection Service has traveled to China to railroad train Chinese officials in meat safety.
One thing Thursday's trade deal did not address: U.South. poultry exports to China. The U.S. used to send a lot of chicken feet over to China, where they are a delicacy. But China banned U.S. chicken imports in 2015, afterwards an outbreak of avian influenza in the Midwest.
China "was a $750 million market just a few years ago, and at present it'south essentially naught. Information technology was one of our most important markets," says Jim Sumner, president of the USA Poultry and Egg Export Council.
But Sumner isn't worried near the new competition from Chinese chicken in the U.Due south. In fact, he welcomes it as an important footstep in reopening the Chinese market place to U.S. poultry producers.
"Merchandise is a ii-way street," he says.
Information technology'due south not clear how soon afterward mid-July we can wait to see cooked chicken products from China in U.Due south. supermarkets. Sumner says he doesn't expect the product to overwhelm store shelves, because the economics of raising chickens in People's republic of china and then shipping them to America still favors U.Due south. producers.
Maria Godoy is a senior editor with NPR News and host of The Salt. She's on Twitter: @mgodoyh
Source: https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/05/12/528139468/chinese-chicken-is-headed-to-america-but-its-really-all-about-beef
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