US may renew supplies of pork to Russia soon

The news agency Interfax has quoted a report by Bloomberg about its interview with US Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack last week. Vilsak said that Russia, the fifth-largest buyer of U.S. pork last year, agreed to lift import bans on the meat from U.S. processors that had disrupted shipments for more than two months.

U.S. and Russian trade officials met in Moscow last week to discuss the issue. In December, Russia restricted imports from 13 plants that made up more than 90 percent of U.S. pork exports to this country. Russia said it found traces of banned antibiotics in meat shipped by a number of US companies.

Tom Vilsack also said that exports were extremely important to the U.S. pork industry. Reopening the Russian market is excellent news for American hog producer, he added.

The antibiotics-processed pork was banned by the Russian sanitary officials and Russia’s imports of pork from the United States fell to 131 metric tons, 33% percent from 2008.

According to Interfax, the optimistic statements of Tom Vilsack sent pork prices at the Chicago Exchange by 0.7%.

Russian Foreign Ministry official Andrei Nesterenko said at the last week’s meeting with the U.S. delegation that the U.S. agreed to issue new certifications that pork plants meet specific Russian microbiological and tetracycline-group antibiotic residue requirements.

As for another issue that is discussed by the two sides currently, poultry imports from the United States, Russia, once the largest importer of U.S. chicken, barred U.S. poultry as of January 1^st after slashing the allowable amount of chlorine that U.S. producers use as a disinfectant.

A draft agreement on U.S. poultry supplies to Russia may be ready by the end of the week, Russia's chief sanitary official said on Wednesday.

"The final draft of the document may be completed by the end of the week," Gennady Onishchenko told the RIA Novosti agency on March 17^th, was now being studied by the U.S. experts.

He noted, however, that this did not mean that the supplies would definitely resume in the near future.