Much has been written and talked about in recent weeks regarding China finally accepting U.S. beef again after a 14 year ban following the discovery of a BSE infected cow in Washington State. Most of the articles I have read do not mention the little caveat that the USDA must have published a proposed final rule by July 16, allowing China to export chicken meat to the US.

Some give President Trump credit for doing what no other president could, but I suggest we check some facts first.

Some say this will be a 2.6-billion-dollar deal, but I wonder if that is really so?

The facts include the date of April, 2006. That is when the FSIS at USDA first published a final rule that would allow China to export cooked chicken meat to the United States. But Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) attached a provision in Section 747 of the House Ag Appropriations Bill that stated: “None of the funds made available in this Act may be used to implement the final rule…”

That language was repeated for several years and exports were dead in the water.

No president can override an act of Congress, not even Trump, and I am certain food safety advocates like Tony Corbo of Food and Water Watch will hope for a repeat of 2006.

After all, China is the country that saw dairy products, infant formula and wheat gluten be intentionally contaminated with melamine to make them show increased protein levels, but resulted in six infant deaths and thousands of hospitalizations. This is the country that shipped bad pet food to the United States that caused many more deaths of loved members of families.

In retaliation to the ongoing feet dragging by the United States to import chicken, China, in 2015, banned chicken products from the United States, including chicken feet. What was a $750 million business is now zero.

As for the $2.6-billion-dollar deal, sure the Chinese have a rising middle class that enjoys good beef—and they are getting it — through Macau.

Macau, officially called “The Macao Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China”, has a population, as of May 25, 2017, of 650,000 people. Hong Kong, its neighbor 40 miles away has a population of about 7.4 million people.

Those two cities have approximately 0.02 percent of the world’s population, yet, the two cities combined rank sixth in the world for the amount of beef imported. They import 5 percent of the world’s total.

How much beef can 8 million people eat?

By way of reference, the entire European Union ranks seventh for imported beef.

On a closing note, the rule that was published in 2006 said China could only export cooked chicken meat, but the chickens had to be slaughtered in a country already approved to export raw chicken meat to the United States, and the closest at the time would have been Canada and us.

I have not followed the issue closely enough to know if that has changed. Hopefully someone will fill in that gap in today’s discussion.

The Chinese chicken “beef”

Join for free* to continue reading.