Chicken Imported From China Will Be Inspected To Ensure Safety, Agriculture Secretary Says

In last month's trade agreement with China, the U.S. agreed to allow Chinese cooked poultry to enter U.S. markets in exchange for China bringing back U.S. beef imports. Therefore U.S. Inspectors will take appropriate steps to make sure that these imports are safe, says Agriculture secretary Sonny Perdue.

In an interview with CNBC, Perdue said tight U.S. food inspections ought to reinforce American consumer confidence in these imports.

"We're talking about cooked chicken," said Perdue, indicating uncooked chicken generally poses a greater food safety risk. "The good thing about it is our food safety inspection agency, in the USDA, does a marvelous job." Perdue, a former governor of Georgia, also said Chinese chicken won't hurt American poultry producers. "I don't think there's really any fear of major chicken poultry protein coming the U.S."

The secretary, travelled to china to formally mark the return of U.S. beef to the Chinese market after a 13-year hiatus. China banned U.S. beef imports after the discovery of a case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy in Washington State in late 2003.

"Those concerns were not justified. I think it was a single animal that came from Canada that had the BSE, or the mad cow disease. And we felt like the suspension of imports from the U.S. was a difficult and wrong decision," Perdue said. "We've had no experience and no evidence of ... [mad cow disease] in over 13 years."