Food-safety advocates are raising alarms over a decision by the Obama administration to permit chicken processed in China to be sold in the U.S. even after several high-profile incidents of food contamination.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture, in addressing a decade-long trade dispute over farm imports, said it will allow poultry slaughtered in the U.S. and Canada to be processed in China and returned to the U.S. for consumption. Critics are vowing to fight the decision, which they say puts consumers at risk due to lax Chinese factory oversight.
“The Chinese food-safety system has had significant failures in the enforcement of its food-safety laws and regulations,” Senator Charles Schumer wrote in a Sept. 16 letter to U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack.
The issue is the latest flashpoint for U.S. concerns over the safety of goods from China, which since 2007 have included tainted baby formula and evidence of the chemical melamine in pet food and eggs. China in recent months has had an outbreak of avian influenza in its chicken flocks and in March, Shanghai authorities retrieved more than 11,000 dead pigs floating in a river.
“Consumers should know that any processed poultry from China will be produced under equivalent food safety standards and conditions as U.S. poultry,” the Agriculture Department said in a fact sheet.
No Fear
Poultry producers say almost all the chicken eaten in the U.S. will still be produced and processed domestically. The U.S. government currently allows Canada, Chile, France and Israel to export processed poultry to the U.S.
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Ninety-nine percent of the chicken we consume here is hatched, raised and processed in the U.S.,” Tom Super, a spokesman for the National Chicken Council, a Washington-based industry group, said in an e-mail. “We don’t expect that to change any time soon.”
Originally Posted by Torchbearer
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