Why worry about rivers of pig carcasses, tons of feces-fed tilapia and a newfound hunger for U.S. food conglomerates in China? It's not as if its long-banned chicken imports are coming back, right?
Well, maybe it's time to worry a bit.
While many shoppers were stocking up for their Labor Day weekend cookouts on Friday, the Department of Agriculture announced it had ended a ban on Chinese chicken imports and allowed four of the country's poultry processors to ship "heat-treated/cooked" chicken to the U.S. The USDA's audit attempted "to determine whether the People's Republic of China's (PRC) food safety system governing poultry processing remains equivalent to that of the United States (U.S.), with the ability to produce products that are safe, wholesome, unadulterated, and properly labeled."
The Chinese plants passed, but even Chinese officials must have been somewhat surprised.
As Bloomberg reported, a senior Chinese policymaker involved in developing food safety standards told reporters at a press conference that essentially, China would have a tough time meeting world standards. China's food supply seldom, if ever, meets USDA standards.
That doesn't bode well for China's return to the U.S. poultry market. Bloomberg said the initial plans call for chickens to be "slaughtered in the U.S. (or another nation that's allowed to export slaughtered chicken to the U.S.), then shipped to China for processing and re-export." Unfortunately, according to The New York Times, no USDA inspectors will be allowed in the Chinese processing plants. Also, because the chicken will be processed, USDA rules say they won't need point-of-origin labeling.
Basically, not only is a country that has never been allowed to export chicken to the U.S. being allowed to process chicken without any supervision, but consumers will have no way to tell if chicken nuggets were processed in the U.S. or in China.
MSN moneyNOW sent e-mail to contacts at McDonald's (MCD -1.04%) to see if the fast-food giant's sourcing for its Chicken McNuggets and other chicken products would change as a result of the USDA ruling. We received no response and, at this point, are as much in the dark about future chicken sourcing as the average U.S. consumer.