NPPC Sends Letter to Vilsack on Global Trichinae Standard

November 26, 2014 — 

The National Pork Producers Council (NPPC) sent a letter to USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack on an international standard for controlling and monitoring Trichinella spp. proposed by the U.N. Codex Committee on Food Hygiene’s (CCFH). [Source: National Pork Producers Council, Updated: 11/05/2014]

Recommendations for the standard will be addressed at the CCFH meeting in Peru in November, and the results will be considered by the overarching Codex Alimentarius Commission (CAC) in July 2015. (The CAC was established by the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and World Health Organization (WHO) to promote food safety and coordinate international food standards.

An FAO working group last month in Rome proposed significant changes to CCFH draft guidelines in key areas that would set the entire Codex process back from progress that has been made over the past years and would negatively affect the U.S. pork industry. NPPC urged Vilsack to support the efforts of U.S. representatives to get the process back on track.

The proposal would damage the U.S. pork industry by ignoring effective Trichinella risk reduction practices that have long been used in the U.S. pork industry, forcing unwarranted on-farm auditing costs on global pork producers, limiting expansion of U.S. exports of chilled pork and providing importers of U.S. pork a justification to restrict imports.

The United States is negligible risk for trichinae. NPPC representatives this month traveled to South America, where they discussed the issue with government officials and pork producers there.