Thailand Should Eliminate Its De Facto Ban on U.S. Pork

NPPC POSITION: Thailand should eliminate its de facto ban on U.S. pork. All U.S. pork and pork products should be allowed full access. IMPORTANCE: Thailand’s population is more than 67 million people, and it has a fast-growing tourism industry because of its strategic location near some of the largest markets in the world. It is a central hub for air travel in Asia, leading to a lot of food imported for airline use. There is a fast- growing urban population, with rising disposable incomes, driving up its restaurant industry. The hotel and restaurant sector expanded 14.8 percent in the first nine months of 2016, with 20 percent of the industry being supplied by U.S. exports. Thailand shows great opportunity for the animal agriculture industry, especially for pork. BACKGROUND: Thailand has a number of trade barriers that operate as a de facto ban on U.S. pork exports. It has been unresponsive to calls from the United States to lift the restrictions and, in fact, has continued to ramp up import protections for pork in recent years. The actions have come despite the fact that Thailand receives enormous benefits from the U.S. Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) program on exports to the United States. It is time for reciprocity in the U.S. – Thailand trade relationship. Thailand should expeditiously open its market to U.S. pork. • Ractopamine Ban. Thailand bans the use of ractopamine in pork production and the importation of pork produced with ractopamine, a feed ingredient commonly used by the U.S. pork industry to improve efficiency in production. Ractopamine is approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and recognized as safe by the U.N.’s Codex Alimentarius Commission, which established a maximum residue level (MRL) for the product in 2012. Thailand’s ractopamine ban violates numerous provisions of the World Trade Organization (WTO) Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) Agreement, including requirements that SPS measures be based on science. Several stakeholders informally have shared that there is use of ractopamine throughout the Thai pork industry, and that Thai butchers request pork carcasses from animals fed ractopamine because they produce a higher-yielding product. • Uncooked pork meat products and offal. Thailand does not accept uncooked pork meat products and pork offal from the United States. The rationale for the ban is unknown. • Import Permits and Fees. The Thai Department of Livestock and Development rarely, if ever, grants import licenses for U.S. pork. The Thai government never has provided reasoning for the arbitrary import permit refusals. Even in the rare instances where import permits have been granted, Thailand imposes different fee structures for domestic pork versus imported pork. The import permit fee for pork is 7 Baht per kilogram, currently equal to about $200 per metric ton, which Thailand argues is needed to cover the cost of health inspections for imported pork. The fee does not pertain to imported pork back fat, casings and offal used for re-export. However, the fee is far more than the cost of any legitimate inspection fee. Domestically produced pork in Thailand is assessed an inspection fee of only $7.50 per metric ton. Thailand should reduce its fee on all pork imports to a level no more than the fee currently applied to domestically produced pork. As a testimony to the effectiveness of Thailand’s import policies in blocking pork imports, the United States, the leading pork exporter in the world, sent in 2016 only 68.9 metric tons of pork to Thailand, a country that consumes around 1 million metric tons of pork per year. NPPC CONTACT: Nick Giordano, Vice President and Counsel, Global Government Affairs, [email protected]; Courtney Knupp, Director of International Trade Policy, Sanitary and Technical Issues, [email protected]; Bill Davis, Senior Director, Congressional Relations, [email protected]; (202) 347-3600.