The Prairie Star: Montana Ag Newspaper

WASHINGTON, D.C. n Recently negotiated free trade agreements (FTAs) with Peru, Panama and Colombia would limit inspections and safety requirements for food imported into the U.S. from these countries.

R-CALF USA CEO Bill Bullard, on Wednesday, participated in a briefing session on the Peru FTA for staff members of the U.S. House of Representatives, which was attended by approximately 35 staffers. Public Citizen and Food and Water Watch representatives also participated in the briefing session.

“The pending FTAs establish new committees to speed up implementation of mechanisms to facilitate trade rules, including ‘equivalence determinations,’ that require the United States to permit imports of meat and poultry products that do not meet U.S. safety standards. Once so-called equivalence is achieved, products to be imported into a country must only meet the standards of the exporting country n not those of the importing country,” notes a new report by Public Citizen, titled “The Trade Deficit in Food Safety; Proposed NAFTA Expansions Replicate Limits on U.S. Food Safety Policy that are Contributing to Unsafe Food Imports.”

“This report highlights the food safety problems inherent in the Peru FTA, which is, essentially, an extension of NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), as it continues to treat cattle and beef as if they were storable industrial goods, rather than perishable and cyclical products,” said Bullard.

“The ITC (International Trade Commission) and Congress made a mistake in 1993 when they passed NAFTA because they predicted that this particular trade agreement likely would have no impact on the U.S. cattle industry because duties, at that time, were already considered small,” he explained. “However, the trade surplus the U.S. had in beef trade between Mexico and Canada soon evaporated, and after 1996, the U.S. experienced persistent beef trade deficits between these two NAFTA countries. By 2005, the deficit reached $613 million.

Regrettably, the U.S. already has one of the most liberalized markets for beef importers in the world, and until the U.S. begins including provisions that recognize and reflect the unique characteristics of the U.S. cattle industry, Congress should reject all FTAs modeled after NAFTA, such as the Peru-U.S. FTA, Bullard continued. “The U.S. needs to tighten n not relax n food safety standards,” he said.

“The Peru agreement fails to incorporate the new information that we’ve now learned from importing tainted catfish and other goods from China, the production phase of producing the final food product is crucial to ensuring the products’ wholesomeness, quality, and safety,” Bullard asserted. “This is particularly important in the production of beef because how the animal was cared for and reared for the 12 months or longer before the animal is processed into beef will affect the final beef product.

“This is why the requirement that allows foreign packing plants to export beef into the United States n so long as the country meets equivalent standards n is inadequate,” he noted. “The United States only inspects about 11 percent of imported beef, pork, and poultry, and we certainly don’t have the resources to ensure that developing countries are not using veterinary drugs, pesticides, and feed supplements that are restricted here in the United States.”

The United States has the highest production standards in the world and we should be using trade agreements to help elevate the production standards in developing countries, not lowering our standards simply to facilitate more imports into the United States, as the Peru agreement would do, said Bullard.

Because the Peru agreement’s Rule of Origin does not require beef to be derived from cattle born, raised, and slaughtered in Peru, live cattle from surrounding South American countries can be imported into Peru, slaughtered in Peru, and the resulting beef exported duty free to the United States, Bullard warned. “There will be no way to determine what production standards were applied to these non-Peruvian cattle that could be included under this agreement,” he said.

“In the face of growing global disease outbreaks, it is absurd to confer the right to foreign countries to challenge U.S. food safety laws, which is what NAFTA has done and what the Peru FTA will do.”

Below are examples of how the United States clearly is moving to systematically relax U.S. health and safety standards:

1. The United States continues to lower its BSE (mad cow disease) standards below the world norm.

2. The U.S. is trying to carve out a section of Argentina affected by foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) in order to facilitate imports of Argentinean fresh and chilled beef, despite Argentina’s FMD status.

3. The U.S. has failed to act on information provided by USDA’s Inspector General, who found that 75 percent of all bovine tuberculosis cases detected at slaughter originated in Mexico.

4. USDA’s Inspector General found that the U.S. ignored the fact that Canadian meatpackers were not meeting U.S. equivalency standards, yet meat was still exported to the United States.

5. USDA’s risk assessment model predicts that Canada will send 19 news cases of BSE to the Untied States once the agency’s over-30-month (OTM) rule takes effect. USDA offers no tangible benefits for subjecting the U.S. cattle industry and U.S. consumers to this increased health risk, other than to “normalize trade.”

“The Peru FTA will only worsen what is already a precarious situation because the goal of this agreement is to facilitate imports into the U.S., resulting in an increased food safety risk, and economic harm to U.S. cattle farmers and ranchers,” Bullard concluded.