The announcement goes on to ridiculously claim that the USDA "has determined that China’s poultry processing inspection system is equivalent to that of the United States, and cooked chicken imported from China would be processed under equivalent conditions as in the United States."
This statement holds about as much water as Obama's claim that "you can keep your health plan if you like it." It's a lie, in other words, and everybody knows it.
USDA to destroy the domestic poultry industry by selling out to China
It's also a disastrous policy. If put into action, it will not only further destroy the economic base of U.S. farmers and chicken growers, it will also wildly contaminate the chicken supply across the U.S. with China-grown chicken laced with arsenic, mercury, lead, cadmium and toxic chemicals.
How do we know this? Because China is the most polluted industrial nation in the world, and it routinely and consistently produces the most heavily contaminated food products anywhere on the planet. It has already been caught killing babies with melamine in infant products, killing dogs with toxic dog treats, counterfeiting meat products and far worse. Natural News Forensic Food Lab tests have confirmed that food products produced in China are consistently the most polluted in the world.
We need to get toxic chemicals and heavy metals OUT of the U.S. food supply, not increase their prevalence in our foods. The FDA, after all, just recently pulled approval of the arsenic-based drug Roxarsone from agricultural use, finally eliminating one of the most prominent sources of toxic arsenic in commercial poultry. If the USDA turns arounds and opens up the U.S. food supply to China-grown chicken, we are all suddenly going to be inundated with cheap, contaminated chicken from China that will eventually bankrupt U.S. poultry producers who, believe it or not, actually produce cleaner chicken products.
USDA sticking head in the sand on food contamination epidemic
The problem with the USDA is that it pretends food is never contaminated with heavy metals. That's why the USDA "organic" certification program utterly ignores the presence of mercury, cadmium, arsenic and lead in organic foods. Any food can contain unlimited quantities of these toxic elements and still be certified "organic" under the USDA.
Will contaminated chicken produced in China also be certified organic and sold at retailers like Whole Foods even though it might contain deadly concentrations of mercury or lead? That's the path the USDA sems to be laying out for America under its absurd "equivalence" policy.
And then there's the animal welfare angle. Although poultry production in the USA is far from what most people would consider "humane," the factory farming operations in China are nothing short of abhorrent. If you thought chickens were abused in domestic poultry operation, just wait until you see secret video one day of the disgusting and cruel chicken production operations in China.
You have to remember: China is a nation that has outlawed all religion, and with that has come the complete abandonment of any sense of wrong vs. right. China is a nation where the mistreatment of animals is not merely widespread but actually embraced by the culture. All across China, virtually all animals are assumed to have no feelings, no experience, no consciousness, no feelings of pain and so on. Thus, Chinese culture sees nothing wrong whatsoever with subjecting animals to extreme confinement or raising them under conditions that are outrageously cruel and painful to the animals.
If the USDA opens up the U.S. chicken market to poultry from China, it will unleash a wave of new animal cruelty and food contamination, all while destroying the U.S. economic activity currently association with domestic chicken production.
Chickens deserve better than to be raised under inhumane Chinese factory conditions
For the record, I raise chickens on a ranch in Texas. This means I have daily interactions with chickens, and I can attest without hesitation that although chickens are by no means highly intelligent creatures, they do have memories, experiences and even personalities. Chickens are not simply mechanical mindless biological robots. Like other animals, they have awareness, they engage in simple decision-making, they can experience fear, joy and a long list of other emotional states.
It is for these reasons that I don't eat the chickens I raise. I only harvest their eggs, not their flesh. On the rare occasions when I do eat meat of any kind, I make sure it comes from truly free-range animals who -- unlike confined animals mass-produced in meat factories -- at least got to experience something resembling a pleasant existence before being slaughtered. In my mind, this is important because what we eat determines the experiences of other conscious creatures. When we buy low-cost meat, we are voting for animal cruelty. When we instead choose truly free-range meats, we are voting for the more humane treatment of animals. And when we choose to eat more plants and less meat, we thereby spare many animals from the experience of being slaughtered altogether.
The USDA seems to have no recognition whatsoever that animals are conscious beings with memories, social lives, experiences and goal-oriented behavior. The agency simply pretends that "all animals are mindless animated matter" and every USDA policy and regulation flows from that delusion.
Why does the USDA embrace this delusion? Because, of course, the myth that animals are not conscious beings just happens to fit nicely with the profit motives of the meat-producing industries. And the USDA caters to the interests of those industries. In fact, the USDA is best described as the "marketing branch" of U.S. agricultural giants. That's why the USDA is pro-Monsanto and has actually conspired with the chemical company to run open-air GMO experiments. It's why there are no limits of heavy metals contamination for certified organic foods. It's also why the USDA is now looking to allow chicken to be imported from China -- because big business interests stand to make a fortune by mass-producing cheap, low-grade contaminated chicken meat which can be used in the U.S. marketplace as school food, prison food or even factory processed into chicken nuggets, dog food or other high-protein foods.
Billions to be made from poisoning Americans with low-grade contaminated food grown in China
Remember: There's always more money to be made from low-grade contaminated food produced in a way that utterly lacks any enforceable environmental standards, ethical standards, health standards or nutritional standards. In a nutshell, that's China!
Essentially, what the USDA is saying with this potential policy is that the American people should be fed worse than dogs. I wouldn't even feed my dog chicken meat from China, much less a fellow human being. Laboratory tests of chicken produced in China are likely to show alarming levels of contaminants, toxic elements, banned pesticides and toxic synthetic chemicals. Is this what the USDA wants Americans to be eating?
Well why not? The USDA already wants Americans to eat deadly GMOs that burn holes in stomach linings and may even cause toxic transgenic effects in humans. Why stop at merely one threshold of mad Frankensteinian food experimentation on the American people? Why not go all the way and allow the importation of Made-in-China Soylent Green produced from the bodies of former Falun-Gong members whose organs have been harvested for the global elite like Steve Jobs?
Some of you think I'm actually making that up, by the way. I'm not. Organ harvesting is routine in China. And where do you think the "waste bodies" are sent after the organs are taken from them? They are almost certainly processed into animal feed and fed to factory-produced hogs and chickens. So if we start importing chicken meat grown in China, don't be surprised if what you're actually eating is second-hand organ harvesting byproduct protein fed to the chickens along with toxic heavy metals, melamine, PCBs, DDT and every other deadly environmental chemical you can imagine.
Lick it up, America! The USDA is under orders to kill you all before you reach the age at which you might collect social security and therefore worsen the national debt. That's the new plan at the highest levels, no doubt: make sure nobody lives long enough to cost Medicare too much money, or to even figure out how to enroll in Obamacare at Healthcare.gov.