During a 45-minute telephone call, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack asked his Chinese counterpart to scale back the ban on imports of U.S. poultry imposed because of avian influenza in the western half of the country. Agriculture Minister Han Changfu demurred, saying Chinese law required a full-country ban, Vilsack told the North American Agricultural Journalists. “They will have a team come to the United States in the summer” to see firsthand U.S. biosecurity controls designed to spot outbreaks and prevent them from spreading.
China, a major customer for U.S. poultry, is among 11 countries that bar poultry meat from anywhere in the United States. Some 38 other countries block poultry from areas with bird flu but allow shipments from elsewhere in the country. “We haven’t had any incidents on the East Coast,” said Vilsack, so regionalized controls are appropriate. The USDA has estimated poultry exports will decline by 8.5 percent this year due to import prohibitions that stem from bird flu, and to the stronger dollar.
Han raised the issue of a U.S. ban on the import of chicken meat that is raised and processed in China, suggesting the issue was similar in principle to the Chinese barrier to U.S. poultry, said Vilsack. “I think it’s different,” he said, because the U.S. ban on chicken meat was a food-safety measure while China’s ban on poultry imports was an animal-welfare issue.
China and the United States agreed last December to a dialogue on agricultural innovation as a way to resolve differing approaches to regulation of genetically engineered crops. Vilsack said he and Han discussed the agenda for the dialogue, which could occur in late summer or fall. China rejected hundreds of thousands of tonnes of U.S. corn last year because the cargoes included a GE variety not approved by Beijing. The United States has suggested China should begin its review of new GE strains while they are being developed rather than wait until a variety is approved by other nations and goes into cultivation.