In the letter to Obama from multinational corporations, they cite the specific law that prohibits cooked chicken imports from China:
Section 727 of the Omnibus Appropriations Act of 2009 forbids funds from being used to "establish or implement a rule allowing poultry products to be imported into the U.S. from the People's Republic of China." Similar provisions have been included in annual appropriations since FSIS [the USDA's food safety agency] issued a final rule on cooked chicken imports from China in 2006 and another prohibition is to be proposed for the bill for Fiscal Year 2010
According to their letter, because FSIS has previously declared Chinese chicken unsafe and the law prohibits them from using any funding to re-assess the safety of Chinese chicken, the ban stays in place. China is ticked off and they've filed a case with the WTO against the US on this.
The multinational corporations' letter does not dig much deeper than calling for the US to comply with the WTO. They say that we should allow FSIS to use funds to assess the safety of Chinese chicken, and they threaten retaliatory actions from U.S. trading partners because we aren't complying with the WTO. I've included a list of the signatories to this letter below.
That letter went to Obama first. It was followed by another letter signed by a broad coalition ranging from family farm groups to consumer advocacy organizations, as mentioned above. Their letter is much more substantive. Here are some excerpts:
China's Weak Food Safety System is Putting U.S. Consumers at Risk
The PRC has a regulatory system that has had difficulty enforcing food safety standards for both domestic and exported products. What is even more troubling is the lack of transparency in the PRC about its food safety regulatory system and its suppression of news of major food borne illness outbreaks that do occur. The PRC has acknowledged some of these problems and it is in the process of implementing a new food safety law that is scheduled to take effect on June 1, 2009. However, there is no evidence that the PRC's ability to regulate food safety will change appreciably, or make their system more transparent to public scrutiny.
Last year's melamine scandal in the PRC is a perfect example of how the PRC's food safety system is unable to prevent even intentional contamination of the food supply. The PRC government took extraordinary steps to prevent news of illnesses and deaths caused by the food adulteration from being made public because it would have conflicted with the staging of the Beijing Olympics in August 2008.
The veil of secrecy that surrounded the early H5N1 avian influenza outbreaks in the PRC and the associated human illnesses and deaths from those outbreaks also points to a government that is less than transparent with its own citizens and the world at large.
As you know, the PRC has been one of the epicenters for H5N1 avian influenza that has impacted both poultry and humans. According to the World Health Organization, there have been twenty-three H5N1 avian influenza outbreaks in the PRC that have afflicted birds and poultry since 1996, with 38 reported human cases and 25 deaths. This is an important animal health issue that also impacts public health and must be addressed before the U.S. should entertain any imports from the PRC of any poultry products.
Furthermore, a number of food products under the jurisdiction of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that are permitted to be imported from the PRC are under Import Alert. Twelve of the 18 current Import Alerts listed for the PRC are for food items, the most recent for products that contain dairy powder that might be adulterated with melamine. In just the past four months, shipments of 467 different human food items imported from the PRC - from seafood to candy - were refused entry by the FDA. The reasons cited included filth; illegal animal/veterinary drugs used; suspected contamination with melamine; unsafe food additives; unsafe color additives; lack of labeling; salmonella contamination; packed in unsanitary conditions; unsafe pesticide residue; poisonous; unfit for food; and failure to register a process.
Unlike the FDA, FSIS is required to have a system in place that evaluates an exporting country's food safety regulatory system before it is allowed to ship meat, poultry and egg products to the U.S. We do not believe that FSIS exercised due diligence when it conducted its equivalency evaluation of the PRC food safety system for processed poultry products.
In other words, we need to worry about bird flu and the Chinese have a history of covering it up. They also covered up poisonings from melamine. (I can add to this that they have previously covered up Chinese problems with AIDS and SARS.) For the foods from China we DO allow into the U.S., we're already having problems with those, and the FDA has been finding and stopping many of them at the border.
Then the letter goes on to detail the process the U.S. has undergone in inspecting the Chinese to see if their regulatory system and safety processes were equivalent with those of the U.S. If they had been found to be as good as or better than U.S. standards and processes, then Chinese chicken would have been allowed into the U.S. Except our inspectors found a system in China that was NOT up to U.S. standards:
The FSIS Equivalency Determination for China was Flawed
In 2004, the PRC had requested that it be allowed to export processed poultry products of domestic Chinese origin to the United States. After it conducted a document review of the PRC food safety system, FSIS dispatched auditors in December 2004 to visit PRC food safety government offices, laboratories and a sample of poultry plants (three slaughter and four processing facilities) that could be eligible to export to the United States. The deficiencies that the auditors found included:
1) The PRC's food safety agency, the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine (AQSIQ), did not exercise control over all of the food processing establishments under its jurisdiction;
2) AQSIQ veterinarians did not consistently enforce FSIS food safety standards;
3) Residue testing methodologies differed from those used by FSIS and in one laboratory, the sampling procedures could lead to cross-contamination;
4) Testing for salmonella was not being consistently performed;
5) Not all documents had been translated into English;
6) Food safety deficiencies were found in five of the seven food establishments visited.
The sanitation issues were so egregious in two of the facilities that FSIS auditors would have recommended that they be delisted or made ineligible to export to the United States.
FSIS auditors returned to the PRC in July 2005 to visit four slaughter facilities. In all cases, the FSIS auditors found that the PRC had not stationed government veterinarians to perform ante-mortem and post-mortem inspections of poultry. In one establishment, FSIS not only discovered a deficient Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point (HACCP) plan, but also encountered serious sanitation issues. The FSIS auditors remarked that had these four plants been eligible to export to the United States, they would have been delisted for failing to meet critical requirements of U.S. food safety standards.
On November 23, 2005, FSIS proposed a rule that would grant the PRC partial equivalency to export processed poultry products to the U.S. provided that the raw poultry came from either the United States or Canada (70 FR 70746-70749). The comment period closed on January 23, 2006, and the overwhelming majority of the 34 comments the agency received were in opposition to the proposed regulation. In fact, the only positive comments came from entrepreneurs from the PRC who stood to benefit from this rule.
The process that ensued subsequent to the closing of the comment period was astonishing. The final regulation was transmitted by USDA to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for review on April 18, 2006. OMB cleared the rule after only one day's analysis. On April 20, 2006, PRC President Hu Jintao visited President George W. Bush at the White House where it was announced that the rule had been finalized. The final rule was eventually published in the April 24, 2006 Federal Register (71 FR 20867-20871).
According to an audit report published by the USDA Office of the Inspector General in August 2008, FSIS was prepared to grant the PRC equivalency status for slaughtered poultry. That determination had not been made public until the release of this particular audit report. For the PRC to be able to export processed poultry products of domestic Chinese origin would require a new rule.
It should be noted that the PRC never certified any plants to export processed poultry products to the United States under the April 24, 2006 rule. Instead, the PRC government renewed its effort to be able to export processed poultry of domestic Chinese origin.
In December 2006, then-Under Secretary for Food Safety Richard Raymond reportedly pledged to PRC officials that he would begin the regulatory process to amend the equivalency status for the PRC so that it could start exporting processed poultry of domestic Chinese origin to the United States.
This rule never was proposed formally and then the Congress passed a prohibition against the expenditure of any funds to implement regulations that would permit the importation of processed poultry products from the PRC.
The last two sections of the letter are entitled "Nothing has changed to justify lifting the ban" and "Our domestic poultry industry should not be sacrificed for unsafe imports." They note, as I did above, that our domestic poultry industry is already in trouble and does not need to be kicked while it's down:
Our domestic poultry industry is already under severe duress with some processors reducing hours of operation, shuttering entire plants, and even declaring bankruptcy. With the reduction in demand for poultry products, some producers have reduced their poultry flocks or have stopped raising poultry altogether. We ask that you resist further burdening our poultry industry by permitting cheap and unsafe imports to enter our food supply.
Groups signed onto the letter to KEEP the ban include:
Alabama Contract Poultry Growers Association
Campaign for Contract Agriculture Reform
Center for Food Safety
Consumer Federation of America
Contract Poultry Growers Association of the Virginias
Family Farm Defenders
Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance
Food & Water Watch
Friends of the Earth
Government Accountability Project
Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement
Land Stewardship Project
Missouri Rural Crisis Center
National Family Farm Coalition
National Farmers Union
Nebraska Farmers Union
Organization for Competitive Markets
R-CALF USA
Rural Advancement Foundation International
Southeast Asian American Farming Association
Groups that wish to lift the ban on Chinese poultry include:
Advanced Medical Technology Association
Agri Beef Company
AJC International, Incorporated
American Farm Bureau Federation
American Meat Institute
Animal Health Institute
Butterball, LLC
Cargill, Incorporated
DGM Commodities, Corporation
Edwards Lifesciences
Elanco
Emergency Committee for American Trade
Fieldale Farms Corporation
Grocery Manufacturers Association
Grove Services, Incorporated
Hormel Foods Corporation
Interra International, Incorporated
JBS S.A.
Keystone Foods, LLC
Kraft Foods, Incorporated
Maritime Products Internatioanl
Mar-Jac Poultry, Incorporated
MetaFoods, LLC
Michigan Corn Growers Association
Monsanto Company
National Cattlemen's Beef Association
National Chicken Council
National Fisheries Institute
National Foreign Trade Council
National Meat Association
National Pork Producers Council
National Retail Federation
National Turkey Federation
New Orleans Cold Storage and Warehouse Company, Limited
O.K. Foods, Incorporated
Pilgrim's Pride Corporation
Sanderson Farms, Incorporated
Seaboard Corporations
Sellari Enterprises Incorporated
Shelf-Stable Food Processors Association
Simmons Prepared Foods, Incorporated
Smithfield Foods, Incorporated
The American Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong
The American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai
The American Chamber of Commerce in South China
The American Chamber of Commerce People's Republica of China
Tyson Foods, Incorporated
United Egg Association
United Egg Producers
USA Poultry and Egg Export Council
U.S. Chamber of Commerce
US-China Business Council
U.S. Daily Export Council
U.S. Hide, Skin, and Leather Association
U.S. Meat Export Federation
U.S. Premium Beef, LLC |
