Page 234 of articles about meat

Customs director Rafael Camilo yesterday said the 50% reduction on import fees for poultry and of pig farmers seeks to protect those sectors and cause lower prices of important staples for the Dominican population.

Canadian pork products will be back on Chinese grocery store shelves after Canada secured the first certification agreement to allow pork imports to China, based on significant negotiations recognizing OIE standards.

According to data collected in recent years by the Ministry of Agriculture, each year about 130 thousand head of cattle and sheep are slaughtered, compared with 180 thousand pigs.

MEPs supported a mandatory "place of farming" indication if possible and if it does not included excess costs. This would apply to products where 50% of ingredients are farmed or where marketing indicates what it is, for example orange juice it would say where the oranges were from but not the water or other ingredients that go into it.

The livestock sector continues to make adjustments in the first several years of the projections in response to high grain and soybean meal prices in 2007 and 2008, followed by weak meat demand caused by the global economic recession. With producer returns squeezed, production incentives fell, leading to declines in total U.S. meat and poultry production through 2011.

There is light at the end of the tunnel for confused consumers as a new labelling code of practice is introduced for the country of origin for pork and pork products. Major supermarkets have endorsed the voluntary code which aims to give clear and unambiguous information about country of origin on packs of pork, bacon and ham.

In December 2009 the Polish agriculture ministry passed the new Pigmeat Quality System (PQS).

China will require tighter controls over animal feed and feed additives after widespread cases of illegal feed additives have led to human poisonings in the last few years.

Although 2009 year-end exports of both U.S. pork and beef were down compared to the prior year, U.S. exports equaled or bettered their main international competitors.

Since 11 February 2010, Germany can export pig meat to South Korea. Initially there are five German swine slaughterhouses that can send their products to South Korea.

The order ending Ontario Pork's days as a mandatory single-desk hog marketing agency has been overturned -- that is, if the province's hog producers want it to be. A ruling Tuesday from the province's Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs Appeal Tribunal reinstates sections of the Ontario Farm Products Marketing Regulations that were revoked in October 2008 by the Ontario Farm Products Marketing Commission.

In 2008 pigmeat production in the EU-27reached 259.6 million head (Table 2), of which more than half (54.4%) came from four countries (DE, DK, ES and FR). The EU foreign balance showed a surplus of 1.8 million tonnes (pigmeat and processed pigmeat), i.e. 7% of the slaughtering, but extra-EU trade represented only 14% of the national foreign trade (in volume terms).

Indonesia has lifted a temporary ban on imports of pork and its by-products after they were ruled out being the source of human swine flu.

As reported by the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis), more than 7.7 million tonnes of meat were produced from commercial slaughtering in Germany in 2009.

The Government has banned importation of pork from South Korea, as well as poultry and live birds from the same country and Taiwan, an Agriculture official said over the weekend.