US food safety officials have blocked a rising number of meat shipments from Australia since 2019 due to fecal contamination, straining trade relations between the two countries, according to documents reviewed by Reuters.
Labor and food safety groups attribute the problem to an Australian system that increasingly allows companies to inspect their own meat, replacing government inspectors. Similar efforts to privatize inspections are underway in other major meat-producing countries including the United States.
Ten shipments of meat from Australia, America’s second biggest foreign meat supplier, were refused by the US Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) because of contamination with feces or other digestive matter in 2020, up from one in 2019 and four in 2018, according to internal data from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) included within the documents.
