Chinese Chicken Is Headed To America, But It's Really All About The Beef

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.American beef producers are rejoicing that the process has finally resulted in allowing them to send beef to China.