Eternal question about
who exactly has more "strict" standards. Lots of differences between systems and some of the biggest global trade battles in history have been over food and individual country regimes. Plenty of places we cannot export food based on claims from those countries about our own products. However, very safe to say many other countries - certainly including EU - is very detailed looking at many things and plenty of this fish is shipped there.
FWIW, the battle here that could ultimately close the door to imports isn't really about any specific new safety claim. USDA is not better or worse than other agencies regarding actual food safety oversight -- but they are quite "different" including from our own FDA. They require a country-to-country negotiation on every single item for import and an initial finding that another country has what they define as a general "equivalent" system. This is a wonderful sounding standard, but it gets very deep into Big Ag politics regarding how this analysis plays out. At a start, I believe the average time for a country to gain this kind of equivalence has been 7-8 years and some very sophisticated countries and products (major items in places like Germany, Australia, etc...) have never succeeded and become embroiled in some nasty trade battles. This is why the effort was made to get catfish moved to USDA -- under the hope that they would then be barred for year(s) while our countries negotiated this new issue, even for an item that has actually been already coming here for close to 20 years.
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In response to this post by KCHoo)
Posted: 09/21/2017 at 5:10PM