Trade Obligations Rubber Stamping Unsafe Meat Importations

Trading Away Food Safety: Implementation of Trade Rules Allows USDA to Bypass U.S. Food Safety Laws, While Border Inspections Drop
Dramatically

New Public Citizen Report Documents How U.S. Implementation of Trade Obligations is Leading to USDA Approval of Questionable Imported Meat

WASHINGTON, D.C. July 11 2003

United States trade commitments under the World Trade Organization (WTO) and North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) have resulted in federal food safety officials allowing imported meat onto U.S. grocery store shelves that does not meet domestic food safety standards, according to a new Public Citizen report, "The WTO Comes to Dinner:
U.S. Implementation of Trade Rules Bypasses Food Safety Requirements."

Under the trade pacts, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has declared the meat inspection systems of 43 countries to be equivalent to the U.S. system, even though some of these nations did not meet core requirements of U.S. law, such as law and regulation requiring meat inspection by independent government officials and zero tolerance for certain contaminants such as feces.

"Equivalency" is an obligation of several WTO agreements, as well as NAFTA. It is designed to allow goods produced under different rules and regulations to be imported into another country with minimal inspection at the border. Before the United States entered the WTO, the USDA required other countries to have standards equal to ours, and the agency inspected foreign plants eligible to export to this country. Now, the USDA declares other countries' meat safety systems "equivalent" based on a review of foreign government paperwork instead of a physical inspection of all meat plants eligible to export to the
United States.

The report also reveals new numbers from the USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) that demonstrate a steep drop in border inspections after a new system was implemented for checking meat imports in 2002. When the system began in the fourth quarter of 2002, there was a 65 percent drop in the rate of imported meat and poultry being inspected. On average between October 2001 and September 2002,
2.5 million pounds of meat were rejected per quarter, but in the last quarter of 2002, just 700,000 pounds were rejected. Millions of pounds of previously rejected meat is now making it onto supermarket shelves.

The Public Citizen report is available at: http://www.citizen.org/documents/PCfoodsafety.pdf