cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/40891725

White House pushing Sir Keir Starmer to make concessions on food standards

Donald Trump is demanding American chlorinated chicken be sold in British supermarkets.

The White House is pushing Sir Keir Starmer to make concessions on food standards in order to revive a transatlantic tech partnership that drastically collapsed on Tuesday.

Jamieson Greer, the US trade envoy, wants Britain to accept hormone-treated chicken and beef, a term he was not able to achieve when the wider US-UK trade deal was first signed in May.

“He is seeking to use the tech partnership as leverage on trade deal concessions he still wants but that didn’t get the first round,” a source close to the negotiations told The Telegraph.

The US pulled the tech prosperity agreement over complaints Britain’s Online Safety Act would police American AI companies. Washington is using this complaint in order to secure fresh compromises in its trade deal with London, The Telegraph understands.

Insiders say the tech agreement collapsed in part because of the absence of an ambassador to Washington, a post which has remained vacant since Lord Mandelson was fired in September over his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein.

  • MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip
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    46 minutes ago

    They also demand that from Switzerland, so we “only” get 14% tax instead of 30+. Despite them being hurt by it too, especially with gold trade.

    And we should allow Teslas, despite them not meeting safety requirements. Is what our company bosses agreed to, without asking the parliament.

      • ms.lane@lemmy.world
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        6 hours ago

        It’s going to pretty easy to tell ‘Product of USA’ just means contaminated/unsafe to eat food.

        Shouldn’t buy US food even outside the current administration, they don’t grow or produce ANYTHING edible there.

        • ayyy@sh.itjust.works
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          2 hours ago

          It’s a huge and widely varying country with wildly different farming practices. I assure you there are more people growing and consuming real quality food in the US than there are people in your country. There is also a huge quantity of poisonous garbage grown and consumed as well.

  • mycodesucks@lemmy.world
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    16 hours ago

    This was the promise of Brexit - no more of those pesky, overbearing EU safety regulations in exchange for trading deals with the devil for bad products that don’t come CLOSE to replacing what was lost.

  • Obinice@lemmy.world
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    16 hours ago

    America has been trying to get us to legalise their shitty chicken for years, fuck right off. We produce our own locally to a much higher standard.

    I’ll buy your Good & Plenty though, my gawd that tastes goooood

    • Schal330@lemmy.world
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      13 hours ago

      I’m not advocating for American chlorinated chicken, but I’m not sure our chicken is to a much higher standard. Over the last few years I’ve noticed a decline in the quality of our chicken from white striping to woody breast. I guess this is caused by them using breeds that grow quickly.

      • nogooduser@lemmy.world
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        9 hours ago

        Wait. No. That can’t be right.

        We were supposed to be able to get much better deals when we could negotiate our own. /s

        Honestly, I don’t understand how anyone fell for that line. How can a single country have more negotiating power than 28 countries including that single country?

        • phutatorius@lemmy.zip
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          9 hours ago

          Yeah, your pricing power is far greater when you’re smaller, duh.

          Perfect example: any individual negotiating with a giant multinational.

    • Soggy@lemmy.world
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      12 hours ago

      Only a small portion of US chicken gets the chlorine rinse, a practice that the EU recognized as perfectly safe by the way. They banned it because they didn’t want poultry processors to get lazy about other hygiene practices. They don’t import American chicken because the cost difference would destroy the local farms.

      • phutatorius@lemmy.zip
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        9 hours ago

        They banned it because they didn’t want poultry processors to get lazy about other hygiene practices.

        It’s often used to conceal the fact that the chicken is riddled with e. coli.

          • RunawayFixer@lemmy.world
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            6 hours ago

            Chlorine washing doesn’t kill off all pathogens, it only suppresses them so that they no longer show up in standard tests. In other words, chlorine washing conceals the presence of pathogens.

            https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/sep/13/science-on-safety-of-chlorinated-chicken-misunderstood "But the academics point to research published last year which found washing food in bleach does not kill many of the pathogens that cause food poisoning. Instead, it sends them into a “viable but non-culturable state”, which means they are not picked up in standard tests, which take a sample of the food and try to culture any germs on it.

            The presence of the pathogens is thus masked by the bleach, but they are still dangerous to human health.

            Erik Millstone, professor of science policy at Sussex University and co-author of the briefing, told the Guardian lives would be at stake if food based on these lower standards were sold in the UK. “I am satisfied [by the evidence] that US food poisoning cases are significantly higher than in the UK. A minority of people suffer fatal complications,” he said. “There will certainly be fatalities, and they typically affect vulnerable people, such as infants, small children and the elderly.”"

      • AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world
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        6 hours ago

        They don’t import American chicken because the cost difference would destroy the local farms.

        Surely the local farms can produce chickens cheaper than importing them across the Atlantic. I know we have cheap goods here, but not that cheap.

        • Soggy@lemmy.world
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          2 hours ago

          Had cheap goods. With the way our food costs have exploded in the last five years we almost certainly wouldn’t have leverage over local production.

          Ignoring that, the behavior that protectionist trade laws are avoiding is: Country A using tax subsidies to artifically deflate the cost of a good, flooding the market of Country B where it isn’t subsidized and eventually putting the producers there out of business so they become reliant on trade with Country A. Protectionism like this isn’t wrong, but people generally don’t like being told that they’re being barred from less expensive options so it gets dressed up in nationalism.

  • potatopotato@sh.itjust.works
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    18 hours ago

    IIRC it’s not just hormones it’s bleached because we consider chicken with salmonella to still be fit for consumption. Our farming processes are so bad that we have to bleach the chicken to attempt to mitigate the hearth hazard.

    • nul9o9@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      18 hours ago

      It’s honestly embarrassing. Every time I hear about an ecoli outbreak on leafy greens, I’m bewildered on how hard it is for our farmers to keep cow shit out of their crops.

    • Soggy@lemmy.world
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      12 hours ago

      The USDA has banned hormones and steroids since the 50s and like 5% of chicken gets the (perfectly safe) chlorine rinse. European countries use the same rinse on leafy vegetables, they just banned it on poultry because they thought it would make processors complacent.

      • ayyy@sh.itjust.works
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        2 hours ago

        Noooo we’re not looking for facts here, it’s a white supremicist corclejerk!

      • potatopotato@sh.itjust.works
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        5 hours ago

        You raise good points, though I think the issue stands that our processors and farmers are extremely complacent to the point of being negligent. I can’t exactly fault Europe for not wanting any part of that, they generally care much more about food quality than we do here.

      • OwlPaste@lemmy.world
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        9 hours ago

        Except that’s not how it works in UK, you have to list the country of origin on the packaging and if that somehow gets repealed, you still have local suppliers who actually tell you from which farm items come from that you can verify yourself.

        yes there are ways around alot of this, but they take time to implement and those of us who care will find a way to avoid. Which i fully intend to.