Russia, China, Dozens More Ban U.S. Pork

by Spence Cooper on 07/06/09 at 7:07 pm

US Pork - No Visa For you

China and Russia — who are among the largest buyers of U.S. pork — as well as the Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, St. Lucia, Indonesia, Thailand, Bahrain, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Jordan, Macedonia, South Korea and Malaysia, continue to ban U.S. pork; the ban was originally implemented during the beginning of the swine flu outbreak.

In addition to China’s refusal to purchase U.S. Pork pumped full of the FDA approved drug ractopamine, China defends its broad on-going pork ban as a safety measure to prevent swine flu from infecting its population, despite “insistence by international health officials that the pork is safe and the country’s hogs are not to blame for the epidemic”, according to AP.

“It’s politics and not science,” said John Lawrence, a professor and livestock economist at Iowa State University. “The product is safe. So why restrict imports?”

“Both Russia and China, and all of these countries, know that this was not a food safety issue,” says Dave Warner, a spokesman for the National Pork Producers Council. “So something else is going on there,” Warner said. “It does seem like it’s a kind of a convenient excuse.”

Previous personal inspections of U.S. packing plants and storage facilities conducted by Russia resulted in them banning imports from 33 U.S. pork plants. FDA guarantees alone that U.S. pork is safe to consume apparently did not convince the Russians.