US wants end to EU ‘chlorine chicken’ ban

BRUSSELS: The US said Monday that Europeans should reconsider their ban on so-called chlorinated chicken and hormone-treated beef imports, as efforts heat up to clinch a swift trade deal with Washington.

This will ring alarm bells in Europe, where fears of US food safety standards being pushed on consumers triggered mass protests in 2015, most notably in Germany, Austria and France. The request follows last week´s threat by US President Donald Trump to hit Europe with crippling import duties on cars unless the EU budged in trade talks that have stalled on agriculture.

Trump "is very fond of his farmers," US Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue told reporters after meeting EU Trade Commissioner Phil Hogan in Brussels. The old row involves the method of making chicken fit for human consumption, with Europeans barring imports of poultry products treated with chlorine dioxide.

Perdue said giving ground on this issue was one example of how Europe could redress a US deficit on farming goods that he said is between $10 and $12 billion. Lamenting the "denigration" of US poultry production, Perdue insisted that fixing the problem was "certainly" a way to shrink the trade deficit and meet the targets of the EU-US trade deal.

Perdue also insisted that US chickens were not in fact cleaned with chlorine, calling this a "fallacy". "You know what it is? It´s vinegar, essentially, and to say that that´s unsafe or not to be used, we don´t think can found to be the basis of sound science," he said.

The White House cabinet member also raised Europe´s attitude to hormone-treated beef as a possible item for review in a transatlantic trade deal, insisting that the stated food safety dangers were unproven by science.

Perdue said he understood the "difficulties" for EU leaders to overcome domestic opposition to US food production methods. "There is a challenge... They need to communicate that we need to make decisions based on sound science and food safety, as well as affordability," he said.