Health Impact News Editor Comments:
Besides
the obvious food safety concerns expressed by Ken Ward below, there is
quite possibly a far greater risk here in this new USDA plan to
privatize poultry inspection. This rule change may exclude small
pastured poultry producers from being able to comply and market their
products.
Currently, it is very difficult for small-scale poultry
producers to find processors that have a USDA inspector present when
processing chicken. Several states do not have a single USDA certified
processing plant available for smaller producers to process their high
end free-range and pastured organic chickens. This is due to the fact
that the large factory poultry operations, who do all of their
processing in-house, have driven most other processing plants out of
business.
Under current regulations, chicken processed without a
USDA inspector present has a very limited market. Most farmers who are
not growing factory birds sold to the main poultry operations that
control all the chicken sold in the U.S., but instead raise pastured
chickens outdoors that they market directly to health-conscious
consumers, have to process their birds on their farm, due to the lack of
processing facilities. In all states, there are limits as to how many
chickens you are allowed to process on your farm, and the restrictions
on selling those chickens vary greatly from state to state. Some states
only allow one to sell these chickens on the farm where they were
processed, which often is very far away from urban areas where most of
the farmer’s customers would be.
In order to ship high quality
chickens directly to customers in another state (as Tropical Traditions
currently does through their
Grass-fed line of meats
produced by small family farms in Wisconsin), the FDA requires that the
chickens have to be processed in a facility with a USDA inspector
present. There are very few of these left in the United States, and if
this new rule that USDA is proposing goes through, even those that are
present will probably be eliminated. No one will be able to order
chicken over the Internet anymore, greatly restricting your current food
choices if you do not want to order factory chickens, and do not live
close enough to a farm to drive somewhere to purchase a chicken raised
outdoors on pasture.
Given this USDA plan, and the
recent FDA plans
for egg laying birds that would effectively eliminate eggs from
pastured chickens, one can’t help but wonder if there isn’t a concerted
effort to squeeze free range and pastured poultry farmers out of the
market in favor of factory birds? Factory chickens make up a
multi-billion dollar industry that often gets its way with government
officials, as was
seen recently in Maryland
where they convinced the government to delay action at cleaning up
the Chesapeake Bay from chicken manure run-off because it would have
hurt their sales too much.
Stop the USDA’s plan for unsafe chicken
Read More Here
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Ban on Chinese Chicken Import Lifted
GeoBeats News [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxCcHamGztc&w=420&h=315]
Published on Sep 6, 2013
Right
before the Labor Day weekend went into full swing, the U.S. Department
of Agriculture announced that the organization had ended a ban on
Chinese chicken imports.
A significant percentage of products we use are manufactured in China. But how about processed food?
Right
before the Labor Day weekend went into full swing, the U.S. Department
of Agriculture announced that the organization had ended a ban on
Chinese chicken imports.
Four Chinese poultry processing
plantswere officially permitted to ship processed chicken to the United
States. The decision to allow these 4 plants to ship processed chicken
to America was reached after inspections conducted earlier in the year.
The
completed report on the passing poultry plants noted that the audit's
goal was "to determine whether the People's Republic of China's food
safety system governing poultry processing remains equivalent to that of
the United States, with the ability to produce products that are safe,
wholesome, unadulterated, and properly labeled."
For now in the
beginning stages, the chicken will be slaughtered in the United States
and in other certified countries before being shipped to China for
processing and re-exported back to the US.
What do you think? Would you eat chicken that you knew came from China?
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Maine Gov. Paul LePage in June 2013. (Robert F. Bukaty/AP)
