HEALTH COACH - China Trade Deal means more American beef, Chinese chicken exports: salt: NPR

HEALTH COACH -

 China Trade Deal means more American beef, Chinese chicken exports: salt: NPR  









Chicken meat for sale in a market in Anhui Province, China.



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 Chicken meat for sale in a market in the province of Anhui, China. 


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 Baked chicken from birds grown and bred in China will soon be headed to America - in a trade deal that really concerns beef. 
 
 Trade secretary Wilbur Ross announced on Thursday night that the United States was importing Chinese chicken and that US beef producers had access to nearly 1.4 billion consumers In China 
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 Chinese appetite for beef is huge and growing but American beef producers have been excluded from this market since a case of mad cow disease occurred in the United States in 2003. In response, Many countries, including South Korea, Japan, Mexico and China, have banned imports of US beef. 
 
 China was the only one of these nations not to end up lifting its ban - and that is a big deal. 
 
 "This is a very big market, that is at least a $ 2.5 billion open market for beef from the United States," Ross said by announcing the # 39, commercial agreement. 
 
 Many people have long seen China's refusal to lift the ban on beef imports to the United States as a negotiating tactic, a measure to allow Chinese imports of chicken to the United States -United. The negotiations that culminated in the new trade agreement have been going more and more for a decade. 
 


 


 
 American beef producers are pleased with what it eventually allowed them to send beef to China. 
 
 "After being excluded from the world's largest market for 13 years, we warmly welcome the announcement of an agreement to restore exports of US beef to China" , Said Craig Uden, president of the National Cattlemen's Beef Association. A declaration. "It 's impossible to exaggerate how beneficial it will be to America' s livestock producers, and the Trump administration will deserve a lot of credit to get that. 
 
 The US should be allowed to export beef to China by mid-July. This is also the deadline for the US to develop rules for importing cooked chicken products from China. Why is chicken cooked instead of raw? 
 
 "In order for a country to ship meat and poultry products to the United States, it must demonstrate that its food safety inspection system is equivalent to the system here in the United States, "Explained Brian Romholm, who was Deputy Assistant Secretary for Food Security at the US Department of Agriculture under the Obama administration. 
 
 39 Equivalence for China with regard to processed chicken products [cooked] was in progress, and this agreement is accelerating this process, "he said." China is also asking for equivalence for its 39 , Inspection for slaughter facilities, but this will be a longer process. "
 
 Given the many epidemics of avian influenza that China has known, it is also worrying that if the Chinese raw chicken Was treated in the United States, it Could potentially contaminate American plants or, in some ways, spread to birds here in the states. 
 
 Tony Corbo, a senior food campaign lobbyist for Food & Water Watch, an environmental advocacy group, has raised concerns about efforts to open the US market to Chinese imports Chicken for years. He questions the ability of the Chinese government to enforce food safety standards, given its low balance sheet. 
 
 This record includes rat meat sold as lamb, oil recovered from drainage ditches in gutters sold as cooking oil, and a formula for infected babies By melamine that damaged hundreds of thousands of babies and killed six. 
 
 Corbo emphasizes that last December the Food and Drug Administration of China said it had discovered up to half a million cases of food safety violations just during the first three quarters of 2016. 
 
 That said, USDA went to China to inspect the factories that would process the chicken to be shipped to America. But Corbo finds little comfort in this. "You do not know for a moment how China applies food safety standards," Corbo said. 
 
 In the past few months, a team from the USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service has traveled to China to train Chinese meat safety officials. 
 
 The business case on Thursday did not deal with exports of American poultry to China. The United States sent a lot of chicken to China, where they were delicious. But China banned US chicken imports in 2015, after a bird flu epidemic in the Midwest. 
 
 China "was a $ 750 million market a few years ago, and now it's essentially zero. It was one of our most important markets" "Said Jim Sumner, chairman of the US Poultry and Egg Export Board. 
 
 But Sumner is not worried about the new Chinese chicken competition in the United States. In fact, it welcomes it as an important step in the reopening of the Chinese market for poultry producers in the United States. 
 
 "Trade is a two-way street," he says. 
 
 It is not clear how long after mid-July, one can expect to see cooked chicken products from China in US supermarkets. Sumner says he does not expect the product to accumulate store shelves because the economy of chicken farming in China and then shipping to the stores, America still favors American producers.