September 3, 2007

 

Food safety meeting could end US-China trade tensions

 

 

US officials are set to settle its animosity with China, particularly on the poultry and pork trade, when the two countries come together on September 11 and 12 for the third annual Food Safety Bilateral Meeting in Washington. The meeting follows consequent attacks of each other's products for health-risk concerns.

 

Richard Raymond - food safety undersecretary for the US Department of Agriculture and member of President George W. Bush's Import Safety Working Group - told Dow Jones Newswires Thursday he will tell the Chinese delegation that the US wants to "get back to business as usual."

 

The two sides will have plenty to discuss after a year in which imported Chinese pet food supplements, fish, shrimp and eel were found to contain harmful chemicals. China, for its part, recently decided to crack down on US pork exports because they detected the chemical ractopamine that producers here use make meat leaner.

 

China cited eight US pork plants in August and those facilities joined a list of now 15 pork and poultry facilities that can no longer export. There are four US poultry plants on the list and they were suspended after China found salmonella and a prohibited antibiotic in shipments.

 

Getting China to stop suspending US pork producing facilities will be important, Raymond said, but getting a wide-ranging agreement between the two countries on minimal residue levels on various substances, or MRLs, is paramount to improving trade conditions.

 

"The main one we will talk about is ractopamine, but we'll also talk about other science-based MRLs that are in existence throughout the world," Raymond said. "We're going to try to get uniformity between their MRL levels and our MRL levels so that when we trade ... we can get to common ground."

 

That may be tough. China, like the European Union has a zero-tolerance level for ractopamine residue in pork. It's not unheard of, though, for countries to drop that zero-tolerance, Raymond said. Japan and Taiwan have both done so.

 

Roughly 60 to 70 percent of swine are fed the chemical ractopamine to help produce lean muscle in hogs, Raymond said.

 

China is a growing market for US pork. Together with Hong Kong, they imported 163.5 million pounds of pork from the US in 2006, according to USDA data. That was up from 146.7 million pounds in 2005 and 116.6 million pounds in 2004.

 

Another zero-tolerance level maintained by China is for salmonella, Raymond said, and that leads to the other area of common ground that USDA hopes the Chinese will come to: microbiological testing.

 

It was salmonella bacteria found in shipments from two of the US poultry plants that have had their exports suspended by China, although Raymond said the punishment wasn't appropriate.

 

"It's difficult to get zero salmonella on poultry products," he said.

 

And China, which has seen its domestic production hurt by multiple outbreaks of highly pathogenic bird flu, is a large importer of US poultry, so it's easy to understand why the US would like to see uniform tolerances. China imported US$348 million worth of US poultry and poultry products in 2006, up from US$167 million worth in 2005, according to USDA data.