Brazil’s Minister for Agriculture, Livestock and Supply Neri Geller this week announced that Brazil was for the first time exporting fresh pork to the United States.
His department said that 25 tonnes of a specific cut were sent a by the company Central Cooperative Aurora.
A company representative said the volume of meat was in terms of international trade, but the company''s goal is to enter and gradually consolidate the US market.
Minister Geller said this first shipment demonstrates the credibility of the Brazilian market in relation to the North American expectations.
Negotiations between the US and Brazil lasted two years, and in this time US missions visited Brazil to verify that Brazilian pork is safe to eat and of a good quality.
In 2013 Brazil produced 3.52 million tons of pork, of which around 513,000 tonnes were exports, which totalled in approximately US $1.35 billion.
By October 2014 Brazil exported approx. 410,000 tons which is valued at US $1.33 billion.
Chicken
Meanwhile, the New York Times reports that the US’s Department of Agriculture has given the go-ahead for fully cooked, frozen and refrigerated chicken to imported from China.
Food safety advocates have been predicting this since last year, when the department approved the import of chicken that was raised in the US but processed in China. This has been proved as uneconomical as no company wanted to ship the chicken to China and then shipped back once processed.
This decision has caused a lot of objections as last year a Chinese television station broadcast a video of processing plant workers in Shanghai picking up the meat off the floor and putting it back on the conveyor belt to be processed.
School lunch advocates have also been worried about this decision as they are worried that the chicken might end up in the soup or nuggets that they serve to the students, as processed chicken does not require “country of origin” labelling.