The U. S. has given the green-light for China to start sending cooked poultry to America. It’s part of a long-simmering trade deal that will open China’s huge market up to U. S. beef producers.
Cooked chicken from birds grown and raised in China soon will be headed to America — in a trade deal that’s really about beef. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross announced Thursday night that the U. S. was greenlighting Chinese chicken imports and getting U. S. beef producers access to China’s nearly 1.4 billion consumers. The Chinese appetite for beef is huge and growing, but American beef producers have been locked out of that market since a case of mad cow disease cropped up in the U. S. in 2003. In response, many countries, including South Korea, Japan, Mexico and China, banned imports of U. S. beef. China was the only one of those nations to not eventually lift its ban — and that’s a big deal. “It’s a very big market; it’s at least a $2.5 billion market that’s being opened up for U. S. beef, ” Ross said in announcing the trade deal. Many people long had seen China’s refusal to lift its ban on U. S. beef imports as a negotiating tactic, a tit for tat for allowing Chinese chicken imports into the United States. The negotiations that led to the new trade deal have been going back and forth for more than a decade. American beef producers are rejoicing that it has finally resulted in allowing them to send beef to China. “After being locked out of the world’s largest market for 13 years, we strongly welcome the announcement that an agreement has been made to restore U. S. beef exports to China, ” Craig Uden, president of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, said in a statement. “It’s impossible to overstate how beneficial this will be for America’s cattle producers, and the Trump administration deserves a lot of credit for getting this achieved.” The U. S. should be cleared to export beef to China by mid-July. That’s also the deadline for the U. S.
