Last week, the USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) announced the publication of a final rule that will allow the importation of fresh (chilled or frozen) beef from Paraguay.
For the past 25 years, the U.S. banned imports of beef from Paraguay due to animal diseases, namely foot and mouth disease (FMD). But the new rule allowing importation lays out a few requirements for imports of beef from the South American country:
FMD must not have been diagnosed in the exporting region in the past 12 months.
Meat must come from premises where FMD has never been present in the animals’ lifetime.
Animals must be inspected before and after death.
With drought causing ranchers to reduce the U.S. cattle herd to its smallest level in decades, companies are relying more on imports to make things like hamburger. Under the agreement, Paraguay must compete with other countries (Brazil, Ireland, Japan, and Namibia) to fill a group tariff-rate-quote of 65K metric tons per year. Paraguay is expected to eventually ship 5% to 10% of the tariff-rate-quota.
Not everyone is excited about this announcement, including the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (NCBA). "USDA based their decision to allow beef imports from Paraguay on a deeply flawed risk assessment that uses old data from site visits that were conducted more than nine years ago," said Kent Bacus, the executive director of government affairs for the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (NCBA), the largest industry group representing U.S. cattle producers.
Similarly, the American Farm Bureau Federation recommended the rule be withdrawn until Paraguay could provide more recent data to protect the U.S. cattle herd from a potential FMD outbreak.
"Farm Bureau policy opposes the Department’s decision to allow chilled or frozen beef exports from Paraguay into the United States and recommends the Department withdraw this proposed rule until more recent and relevant data can be acquired from the government of Paraguay and other relevant organizations to show there is no risk of an infectious animal disease outbreak in the U.S. domestic animal population," the AFBF wrote.
The final rule was published last week and will go into effect 30 days after the publication.
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