| China did not lose time to put their point across:
China said here Friday a recent US law banning poultry imports from China is "obviously discriminatory" and harms the due interests of Chinese poultry industry.
Doing a little research into this particular case, I found this reply from the Ministry of Commerce spokesman Yao Jian: the The Section 727 of the Omnibus Appropriations Act of 2009, which was signed into US law in March, disrupts the normal Sino-US poultry trade activities and breaches the World Trade Organization (WTO) rules on tariffs and farm produce.
What happens next? If this fails China can request the establishment of a WTO expert panel to investigate and rule on the legality of the US measure. Ho hum. More from the China Daily:
"The international community should overcome the current hardships together, prevent the financial crisis from spreading and jointly fight trade protectionism," said Yao Jian. "That was also a significant common understanding reached at the London summit by leaders of the Group of 20 countries in early April."
Looking back at the history of Sino/US poultry trade, China and the United States banned imports of each other's poultry products in 2004 following outbreaks of bird flu. Although they both agreed to lift the bans at the Sino-US Joint Commission on Commerce and Trade in 2004, China did lift the ban but has complained that the United States did not following suit.
Let me refresh your memory with this article from the New York Times, dated May 2007, not so long ago:
Dried apples preserved with a cancer-causing chemical.
Frozen catfish laden with banned antibiotics.
Scallops and sardines coated with putrefying bacteria.
Mushrooms laced with illegal pesticides.
These were among the 107 food imports from China that the Food and Drug Administration detained at U.S. ports just last month, agency documents reveal, along with more than 1,000 shipments of tainted Chinese dietary supplements, toxic Chinese cosmetics and counterfeit Chinese medicines.
For years, U.S. inspection records show, China has flooded the United States with foods unfit for human consumption. And for years, FDA inspectors have simply returned to Chinese importers the small portion of those products they caught -- many of which turned up at U.S. borders again, making a second or third attempt at entry.
Now the confluence of two events -- the highly publicized contamination of U.S. chicken, pork and fish with tainted Chinese pet food ingredients and this week's resumption of high-level economic and trade talks with China -- has activists and members of Congress demanding that the United States tell China it is fed up.
I remember reading some Australian blogs a couple of months ago about farming practices in China, doing some research on the melamine scandal and what I found wasn't pretty: some farmers try to maximize the output from their small plots by flooding produce with unapproved pesticides, pumping livestock with banned antibiotics, and using human feces as fertilizer to boost soil productivity. But these questionable practices don't end there: chicken pens are frequently suspended over ponds where seafood is raised, recycling chicken waste as a food source for seafood, according to a leading food safety expert who served as a federal adviser to the Food and Drug Administration. Yikes! Do we need Chinese poultry this bad?
Until China cleans up its food safety record in a verifiable manner I will continue to eat chicken only if I know where it has been raised. Still, the other side of the coin is that the US must also clean up its act, both the peanut and the pistachio recalls are still fresh on our minds.
To be fair to the Chinese government, it is trying to address the question with its third annual "China International Food Safety & Quality Conference". The following words are from Premier Wen Jiabao, People's Republic of China:
"The Chinese government attaches great importance to food safety because it is not only in the interest of the Chinese but also people in the world."
When it comes to protecting food, good governance is good for business. The reverse is unacceptable. |
