USDA APPROVES IMPORTATION OF CHICKENS FROM CHINA

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) quietly announced on Aug. 29 that it has lifted the ban on processed poultry imports from China.

 

As the New York Times first reported, the products will be offered without a country-of-origin label.

 

The chickens will still be raised in the U.S., Canada or Chile (the only countries approved by the USDA), but can be processed in China because USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) auditors have approved four Chinese poultry plants to start exporting processed poultry to the U.S.

 

The imported processed poultry will be labeled with country of origin when it reaches U.S. shores, but individual companies get to decide if they will label individual products, FSIS spokeswoman Arianne Perkins told CBSNews.com.

 

Not offering a country-of-origin label leaves consumers in the dark, with no way of knowing if they are eating a product that comes from a country that has recently seen a series of food safety scandals, like China, where there was a recent outbreak of H7N9 bird flu virus in fresh meat markets.

 

The industry publication World Poultry questioned whether the change in legislation would eventually lead to Chinese-bred raw poultry working its way into the U.S. market."It is thought ... that the government would eventually expand the rules, so that chickens and turkeys bred in China could end up in the American market.

 

Experts suggest that this could be the first step towards allowing China to export its own domestic chickens to the U.S.," a World Poultry analyst wrote.

Read more - http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-205_162-57601738/

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(NaturalNews) The USDA has announced its intention to allow China-grown chicken meat to be imported into the USA. "The U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) has announced that China is eligible to export processed, cooked chicken to the United States," says an official announcement on the USDA website.

 

The announcement claims that the USDA "has determined that China’s poultry processing inspection system is equivalent to that of the United States, and cooked chicken imported from China would be processed under equivalent conditions as in the United States."

 

If put into action, it will not only further destroy the economic base of U.S. farmers and chicken growers, it will also wildly contaminate the chicken supply across the U.S. with China-grown chicken laced with arsenic, mercury, lead, cadmium and toxic chemicals.

 

Chinese products have killed babies with melamine in infant products, dogs with toxic dog treats.

 

The problem with the USDA is that it pretends food is never contaminated with heavy metals. That's why the USDA "organic" certification program utterly ignores the presence of mercury, cadmium, arsenic and lead in organic foods. Any food can contain unlimited quantities of these toxic elements and still be certified "organic" under the USDA.

 

And then there's the animal welfare angle.  There is concern about animal treatment standards in China.

Read more - http://www.naturalnews.com/042894_USDA_China_imports_chicken.html

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