In the wake of Chinese President Hu Jintao's recent U.S. visit, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has rushed approval of an interim rule that opens the door for increased poultry imports from China. The USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service would still need to approve slaughter practices before any Chinese chicken ends up in our shores, but pending that, even areas that have experienced outbreaks of avian influenza (bird flu) would be allowed to export poultry to the U.S. In other words, the biggest roadblock has already been overcome.Given that China's food safety system is, well, practically nonexistent, this is a disturbing prospect. From the huge pet food recall to food tainted with banned pesticides to the great melamine milk disaster, China's food safety lapses seem to always be in the headlines. While China has been working diligently to improve its food safety image, it seems that actually improving food safety is not much of a priority. A Chinese food safety activist was even recently jailed for two-and-a-half years for "inciting social disorder" merely by forming a support group for parents whose kids were sickened by milk tainted with melamine. If only inciting social disorder were really that easy...
Why, you may ask, is our government willing to throw caution about our health and safety to the wind to make China happy? In a word: beef.
In the wake of the mad cow scare, many countries banned the import of American beef, a state of affairs that has American beef ranchers — and the corporations that rely on them — pretty peeved. Political interests from both sides of the ocean have been pressuring the U.S. government to engage in a sort of beef-for-chicken swap; if the U.S. will import Chinese chicken, China may begin buying U.S. beef.
The fact that this deal is more important that consumer protection is bad enough, but in the rush to push this deal through, it seems the USDA has been breaking its own rules. Food & Water Watch put in a Freedom of Information Act request and (two years later) found out that the USDA skipped a few steps in the approval process, including failing to send the rule to the USDA Office of Civil Rights for review. They also released statements leading the public to believe that country-of-origin labeling would allow consumers to avoid Chinese poultry if they so choose, despite the fact that processed poultry products would require no such label.
In light of all of this, Food & Water Watch has submitted a Citizen's Petition to remove China from the list of countries approved to export poultry to the United States. Please sign the petition urging the Secretary of Agriculture to keep the ban and keep unsafe Chinese poultry off our plates!
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