November 11, 2009

US bone-in beef to arrive in Taiwan within one week

The first batch of US bone-in beef will reach Taiwan within one week after the USDA issued Quality System Assessment (QSA) certifications to qualified suppliers.

The new QSA regulations stipulate that both boneless and bone-in beef from cattle less than 30 months of age slaughtered after November 2 can be exported to Taiwan, while only boneless beef from cattle slaughtered before that date can be sold to Taiwan.

With QSA certifications, US bone-in beef will be subjected to that same inspection and quarantine procedures as those applied to boneless beef once arriving in Taiwan, said an official from Taiwan's Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA).

After calculating shipping days, the first shipment is expected to arrive in Taiwan after November 17, the official said.

A protocol signed October 23 gives market access to US ground beef and beef offal, but the MOEA official said the possibility of the USDA issuing QSA certifications for these products is remote.

Moreover, the bureaucratic procedures known as "three controls, five certifications" are also expected to help bar those products from entering Taiwan amid public fears of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) or mad cow disease, the official added.

Lin Hsueh-jung, director of the Bureau of Food Safety under the Department of Health, said US beef exporters should submit three certificates -- QSA certificates, beef safety certificates and quarantine certificates -- when shipping their beef to Taiwan.

Once the products arrive at Taiwan's ports of entry, the MOEA's Bureau of Standards, Metrology and Inspection and the Council of Agriculture's Bureau of Animal and Plant Health Inspection and Quarantine will respectively conduct random checks on the shipments, with five percent of the products expected to be inspected before entering Taiwan, Lin said.

Lin said the MOEA has separated US beef offal and ground beef from bone-in beef and given each of them a separate CCC Code classification number to facilitate import controls.