Chinese to build 20 beef processing plants in USA to export beef.

Chinese announced today the plan to build 20 beef processing plants in the USA to be used to export beef to China. This is good news for cattle ranchers, truckers, plant workers, and everyone involved in the supply chain.
Chinese also have greatly increased orders of soybeans, natural gas, oil, from the USA and orders will continue to grow as American business grow to accomodate the increase.
Also, cooked chicken from birds grown and raised in China soon will be headed to America — in a trade deal that's really about beef.
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross announced Thursday night that the U.S. was greenlighting Chinese chicken imports and getting U.S. beef producers access to China's nearly 1.4 billion consumers. But the deal is raising concerns among critics who point to China's long history of food-safety scandals.
The Chinese appetite for beef is huge and growing, but American beef producers have been locked out of that market since a case of mad cow disease cropped up in the U.S. in 2003. In response, many countries, including South Korea, Japan, Mexico and China, banned imports of U.S. beef.
China was the only one of those nations to not eventually lift its ban — and that's a big deal.
"It's a very big market; it's at least a $2.5 billion market that's being opened up for U.S. beef," Ross said in announcing the trade deal.
Many people long had seen China's refusal to lift its ban on U.S. beef imports as a negotiating tactic, a tit for tat aimed at allowing Chinese chicken imports into the United States. The negotiations that led to the new trade deal have been going back and forth for more than a decade, stalled at one point by worries in Congress over China's food-safety practices.
reported it had uncovered as many as a half-million cases of food-safety violations just in the first three quarters of 2016.
That said, the USDA has gone to China to inspect plants that would process the chicken to be shipped to America. But Corbo finds little comfort in that. "You don't know from moment to moment how China is enforcing food-safety standards," Corbo says.
In recent months, a team from the USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service has traveled to China to train Chinese officials in meat safety.
One thing Thursday's trade deal did not address: U.S. poultry exports to China. The U.S. used to send a lot of chicken feet over to China, where they are a delicacy. But China banned U.S. chicken imports in 2015, after an outbreak of avian flu in the Midwest.
China "was a $750 million market just a few years ago, and now it's essentially zero. It was one of our most important markets," says Jim Sumner, president of the USA Poultry and Egg Export Council.
But Sumner isn't worried about the new competition from Chinese chicken in the U.S. In fact, he welcomes it as an important step in reopening the Chinese market to U.S. poultry producers.
"Trade is a two-way street," he says.
It's not clear how soon after mid-July we can expect to see cooked chicken products from China in U.S. supermarkets. Sumner says he doesn't expect the product to overwhelm store shelves, because the economics of raising chickens in China and then shipping them to America still favors U.S. producers.

 

Just watched it a few minutes ago on CGTN which is a Chinese news website, but English language. www.cgtn.com


How US beef imports benefit Chinese cattle industry

 

By CGTN's Gao Songya
China's cattle sector is strengthening its stake in American cows, thanks to the lift of the ban on US beef imports in China that's expected to especially benefit the state of Texas.
China's Inner Mongolia-based Kerchin Cattle Industry, one of the biggest cattle ranchers in the country that provides mainly high-end beef products, sees the US beef imports as a necessary supplement to meet the growing demand in the Chinese market.
Companies like Kerchin now focus on long-term development and want to be more competitive by buying or investing in top class production lines.

Inside a Kerchin slaughterhouse in China. Kerchin has been looking to upgrade its production line to meet international standard. This slaughterhouse is designed and co-managed by German engineers. /kerchin.com
The company officials of Kerchin recently visited some ranches in Iowa and Texas and said they are ready to expand their business there. The company also wants to create their own production lines in the US.
Chinese SMEs and individual investors also want a share in US beef imports. As the Chinese cattle industry increases its investments in the US, local governments are welcoming the new money.
“We want to encourage investment from the Chinese here. We are very open to the idea of having Chinese business people invest in Texas,” said Texas Secretary of State, Rolando B. Pablos.
China's beef imports hit 2.5 billion US dollars last year, with total shipments of nearly 580 thousand tons. US Ambassador to China Terry Branstad said the US wants to export more high quality food products to China, and the lifting of the ban on beef is a new beginning for the two countries.
(Cyrus Ip and Gao Songya also contributed to the story.)

 

China announced today they will start importing huge amounts of rice from the USA. My guess is, most of it will come from Arkansas, which is the nations largest rice producer. Arkansas already exports lots of rice to the world. Those of us that have hauled those loads know they're always heavy and usually the truck is at 80K lbs. Riceland Foods ships most of it if I'm not mistaken.
@x1Heavy - whatcha think?