GHY Tradelines

(Stanley Lubman – WSJ)

If a diner in the U.S. consumes a lunch of tilapia, mushrooms and spinach, there’s a decent chance the entire meal was imported from China. And the overwhelming odds are that none of those foods were inspected by the Food and Drug Administration when they arrived in the U.S.

This week’s revelation that nearly half the rice sold in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou was found to be tainted with cadmium is just the latest in a long string of eye-catching stories that illustrate the dangers of eating in China. But lost in the exhaustive media coverage of the polluted foods that find their way on to Chinese tables are serious questions about what happens — or doesn’t happen — when Chinese food products make their way into the U.S.

Chinese food product imports to the U.S. are continuing to rise, but inspections in both China and the U.S. aren’t keeping pace, posing a growing danger to consumers. Many of the imports are used by restaurants, institutions and food processors; as a result, consumers see no labels, keeping them unaware of the origins of what they’re ingesting. Read more here.
 

(STR Trade Report)

The Department of Agriculture has issued an updated federal order that, effective May 20, will revise the restrictions on the importation of plant host material of the citrus longhorned beetle and the Asian longhorned beetle. USDA states that these beetles pose a significant threat to many important fruit, forest and ornamental trees in the U.S. and that it is therefore necessary to impose restrictions on the importation of cut flowers and greenery as well as specific plant hosts of these pests.

According to the USDA, the revised federal order will:

- allow imports of host plants from certain countries that had previously been placed on the list of plants whose importation is not authorized pending pest risk analysis;

- remove requirements for CLB and ALB host plants for planting from Canada based on Canada’s declaration that the ALB has been eradicated and that the CLB is not known to occur in that country;

- add Switzerland to the list of countries where the CLB and/or ALB are present; and

- add one ALB host genus and three CLB host genera
 

(MM&D)

Canadian manufacturers fear even more fees may be looming at the Canada-U.S. border as the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) recommends revenue-generating measures that could result in higher costs.

In a presentation to stakeholders in the U.S. capital this week, the department suggested new border fees because some federal agencies, including U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), are currently providing free services at America’s borders.

CBP works in collaboration with the USDA’s agriculture quarantine and inspection program, which provides checks of imported agricultural goods and commercial aircraft, rail cars, ships and even passenger baggage to prevent harmful pests, diseases and materials from entering the U.S.. “Approximately $191 million in CBP costs are associated with services for which no fee is currently charged,” the department’s presentation stated. U.S. federal agencies “need to recover all costs associated with fee services and have fee revenue from each fee service cover the associated costs.” In conclusion, it said: “Consider establishing new fees.” Read more here.
 

(STR Trade Report)

The Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service is accepting comments through June 25 on the proposed extension of an information collection associated with the regulations for the importation of seed and screenings from Canada. U.S. companies that import seed for cleaning or processing may enter into compliance agreements with APHIS that eliminate the need for sampling shipments of Canadian-origin seed at the border and allow these importers to clean the seed without direct supervision of an APHIS inspector.

This program involves the use of information collection activities, including a declaration for importation, container labeling, notification of seed location, a seed return request, seed identity maintenance, documentation for U.S.-origin exported seed returned to the United States, written appeal for cancellation of a compliance agreement and request for a hearing, and associated recordkeeping. In addition, two forms that are required are PPQ Form 925, the Seed Analysis Certificate (for Canadian-grown seed destined for the U.S.) and PPQ Form 519, the PPQ Compliance Agreement.
 

(Journal of Commerce)

The U.S. Department of Agriculture will amend its regulations governing the importation of animals and animal products from the European Union, effective April 15.

After conducting a risk evaluation, the agency said it would recognize 25 EU member states as the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service-defined EU poultry trade region and add it to the list of regions considered free of Newcastle disease and highly pathogenic avian influenza. Read more here.
 

(Katy Askew – Just Food)

A rift between the US and Canada has deepened over country-of-origin labelling regulations for meat products.

The US food industry has long-objected to the World Trade Organisation’s 2008 COOL rules for meat products, insisting they are an unnecessary regulatory burden.

A complaint was brought before the WTO arbitration service by Canada and Mexico, highlighting the US’s failure to comply with the WTO’s COOL rules. In December the Obama Administration was given a deadline of 23 May to alter its labelling policy in order to bring it into compliance with the country’s WTO commitments. Read more here.
 

(Omid Ghoreishi – The Epoch Times)

Ottawa is warning that it may take “retaliatory measures” if the U.S. doesn’t abandon its new country-of-origin labelling rules for meat products. Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz said the government is “extremely disappointed” with the proposed labelling rules.

“The proposed changes will increase the discrimination against exports of cattle and hogs from Canada and increase damages to Canadian industry,” Ritz said in a statement March 8.

Changes to America’s country-of-origin labelling rules proposed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) require muscle cut commodities to include information about where each of the production steps – where the animal was born, raised, slaughtered – occurred. Read more here.
 

(Journal of Commerce)

U.S. Customs and Border Protection Office of Field Operations agricultural specialists at the Port of Baltimore discovered on Feb. 7 that a shipment of celery seed from India was infested with dead Khapra beetles.

The specialists immediately collected specimens of the dead insects and sealed the container. The specimens were forwarded to a U.S. Department of Agriculture entomologist who confirmed them as Khapra beetles, one of the world’s most destructive insect pests of grains, cereals and stored foods. It is the only insect that Customs takes regulatory action against even while in a dead state. Read more here.
 

(STR Trade Report)

The Government Accountability Office has issued a report reviewing the implementation of seven recommendations it made in 2006 concerning the Agricultural Quarantine Inspection program, which places agriculture inspectors at U.S. ports of entry to inspect imports and intercept foreign pests. The GAO notes that AQI is important not only to the U.S. economy, which loses an estimated $136 billion in agricultural revenue to invasive species each year, but also to efforts to protect against the deliberate introduction of pests and diseases. […]

The GAO notes that USDA and DHS have taken steps to implement all seven of its 2006 recommendations but face challenges in fully implementing four of them. Specifically, DHS and USDA have implemented recommendations to improve information sharing, review DHS’s financial management system for AQI, and remove barriers to timely and accurate transfers of AQI user fees, which are collected for AQI services provided in connection with the arrival of international air passengers and conveyances at U.S. ports. “However,” the GAO states, “the AQI program continues to wrestle with fundamental problems that undermine the management of the program and risks wasting resources in a fiscally constrained environment.” Read more here.
 

(CBC News)

CFIA expands recall again to include some beef products sold in Ontario and Quebec

For the first time in three years the U.S. Department of Agriculture will audit Canada’s food inspection agency, which includes a visit to the Alberta-based XL Foods meat plant at the centre of an international beef recall because of E. coli contamination.

Audits are standard for importing countries, according to Bonnie Buntain, the professor of public health at the University of Calgary and the former chief public health veterinarian for the USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service.

“The team of U.S. officials will look at every aspect of the way Canada inspects as well as line it up to their requirements. That would include how much Canada does the E. coli testing to all the other pathogen testing, whether or not that methodology is still equivalent to what the U.S. does,” Buntain said. Read more here.
 

(Food Safety News – Dan Flynn)

In implementing its new Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), the United States wants to boldly go where no government has gone before in protecting food imports, but the European Union (EU) doesn’t like it.

Carlos Alvarez Antolinez, an EU food safety official stationed in Washington D.C., told the International Association for Food Protection (IAFP) Monday that the 27 member EU countries he represents has some significant issues with FSMA.

Third party auditing, inspections, and foreign supply verification procedures top the list of the EU’s concerns with the new U.S. law. With governmental authority for a continent of 500 million people speaking 28 languages, the EU is also in a position to stop what it does not like.

“We have been very grateful to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA),” Antolinez said. He said the EU has remained in constant dialogue with FDA since President Obama signed the new food safety law in January 2011, and seemed to suggest somewhat humorously that the U.S. and the EU might be more at impasse if the American government were further along in implementing the new law. Read more here.
 

(Journal of Commerce – Bill Mongelluzzo)

Weekly report will give exporters information about availability of containers at 18 inland points

The U.S. Department of Agriculture on Wednesday released the first Ocean Shipping Container Availability Report designed to alert exporters about possible surpluses or shortages of marine containers at 18 inland intermodal load points.

USDA, in cooperation with the Westbound Transpacific Stabilization Agreement, a discussion group of 10 carriers in the westbound Pacific trade to Asia, will use the service to provide shippers with a weekly snapshot of equipment availability at the designated locations. Read more here.
 

(STR Trade Report)

The Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service has created a new Web site that will provide stakeholders with information about the commodity import approval process for plants and plant products, including fruits, vegetables, plants for planting, cut flowers, wood and wood products.

Persons who request changes to the import regulations and who wish to import plants, plant parts or plant products that are not allowed into the U.S. must file a request with APHIS. USDA regulations set forth the procedures for submitting requests and supporting information, which includes information about the requestor, information about the commodity to be imported, shipping information, a description of pests and diseases associated with the commodity, risk mitigation or management strategies, and additional information as determined by APHIS to complete a pest risk analysis in accordance with international standards. Once the risk analysis has been completed and APHIS determines that the risks associated with the commodity in question can be adequately mitigated, the risk analysis is made available for public comment.

In response to stakeholder requests for more information about the commodity import approval process and the ability to participate at an earlier stage in the development of risk assessments, APHIS has created a Web site that will describe each major step in this process, including a general description of the following: determination of the import status of a commodity, submission of a request by a national plant protection organization, initiation and drafting of risk assessment and risk management documents, completion of an environmental review, and publication and implementation of new requirements, as applicable. APHIS will also post draft risk assessments on this Web site for 30 days to give stakeholders an opportunity to review them and provide comments via email.

(Food Safety News – Dan Flynn)

Long in the making, the start-up date for USDA’s new Public Health Information System (PHIS) is now just two weeks away on May 29. It will replace the Performance Based Inspection System at all regulated USDA establishments and for all meat and poultry imports and exports.

Dr. Elisabeth Hagen, USDA under secretary for food safety, has hailed the coming of PHIS as a method of “arming our inspectors with a powerful tool, on the ground, to carry out USDA’s food safety mission more effectively.”

Hagen says the new single database designed to gather, collate and use all data collected by the Food Safety and Inspection Service’s (FSIS’s) entire inspection regime is not just a change out in the IT system, but an entirely new inspection infrastructure. Read more here.
 

(Dina ElBoghdady — Washington Post)

Every day, inspectors in white hats and coats take up positions at every one of the nation’s slaughterhouses, eyeballing the hanging carcasses of cows and chickens as they shuttle past on elevated rails, looking for bruises, tumors and signs of contamination.

It’s essentially the way U.S. Department of Agriculture food safety inspectors have done their jobs for a century, ever since Upton Sinclair’s blockbuster novel, “The Jungle,” exposed horrid conditions in a Chicago meatpacking facility and shook Americans awake to the hazards of tainted food.

But these days, the bulk of what Americans eat — seafood, vegetables, fruit, dairy products, shelled eggs and almost everything except meat and poultry — is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration. And the FDA inspects the plants it oversees on average about once a decade. Read more here.
 

(Food & Drink Digital – Sasha Orman)

“We have to get our fiscal house in order,” U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack told reporters today in a conference call. “That’s going to involve tough calls.” One of those tough calls includes the USDA’s plan to shut down 259 offices throughout the United States and seven more overseas. While the plan could save the government $150 million and the USDA claims that it will have no impact on the department’s ability to efficiently uphold food safety standards, not everyone is satisfied with the decision. […]

According to Vilsack, the move is still necessary to compensate for the $3 billion budget cut handed down to the USDA from congress in 2010. But while he has told the press that he does not see “significant disruptions to service” in the USDA’s future, agencies are already being taken to task for their responsibilities to ensuring food safety. It is difficult to imagine that the USDA will be able to do even more when equipped with even less. Read more here.
 

(WebMD Health News – Daniel J. DeNoon)

The USDA [December 21] announced two new rules to make U.S. beef safer.

The announcement accompanied the first report of the two-year-old Food Safety Working Group, led by the White House and staffed by agencies within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

Taking effect in 2012, the new rules:

• Declare “adulterated” and unfit for sale any beef that tests positive for any shigella toxin-producing E. coli bacteria. Current rules cover only a single strain of the potentially deadly bug, yet the other strains cause about 112,000 illnesses each year.

• Begin a “test and hold” policy for beef. Beef lots selected for testing will be withheld from market until test results show them to be free of germs and drug residues. Under the current system, beef that tests positive for bacteria or contaminants has to be recalled. The FDA estimates that the test-and-hold policy would have prevented 44 recalls from 2007 through 2009.

Read more here.
 

(Agriculture And Agri-Food Canada)

We would like to bring to your attention an announcement made by USDA-FSIS on September 13, 2011, regarding an intention to propose rulemaking to extend zero policy tolerance for E. coli to six more non-O157 E. coli strains. … I have attached an advance copy of the proposed rule.

As of today [September 19], the proposed rule has not yet been officially published in the Federal Register. We are monitoring the Federal Register daily, and will send out a follow-up email as soon as there is official publication.

Please note that CFIA officials are currently analyzing the advanced copy of the proposed rule to determine if and how it could impact Canadian industry.
 

(Food in Canada)

An online tool developed by several branches of the U.S. government will help all stakeholders be ready in a food emergency

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has made its Food Related Emergency Exercise Boxed Set publicly available online.

The FDA developed the tool, also known as FREE-B, with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, and the Food Safety and Inspection Service.

The aim is to encourage all stakeholders to examine their food emergency response plans. Read more here.
 

(World Trade Interactive)

Importers and domestic manufacturers of softwood lumber will be subject to a new assessment beginning Jan. 1, 2012, under a Department of Agriculture final rule. The assessments will be used to finance operations under the new Softwood Lumber Research, Promotion, Consumer Education and Industry Information Order, which aims to strengthen the position of softwood lumber in the marketplace, maintain and expand markets for softwood lumber and develop new uses for softwood lumber within the U.S.

The assessment will initially be set at $0.35 per thousand board feet of softwood lumber shipped within or imported into the U.S. but could be increased to a maximum of $0.50 per thousand board feet. No assessments will be imposed on organic lumber, exports, entities that domestically manufacture and ship or import less than 15 million board feet per fiscal year, and the first 15 million board feet for imports and domestic shipments in excess of that amount.