USMEF: Joint Effort Will Simplify Red Meat Exports To Canada

Exporting red meat to Canada will become a bit easier, thanks to simpler regulations and paperwork. It’s all thanks to a joint effort between the USDA’s FSIS and the department’s counterpart in Canada. Cheyenne McEndaffer, U.S. Meat Export Federation director of export services says the two countries initiated these updated export requirement to make sure red meat requirements were up to date, and to make the export library more user friendly. She added while this agreement does not provide additional market access it does provide clarity, which was desperately needed.

“The export library to Canada prior to this was about 32 pages long and it was a huge mass of information that any new, or existing exporters really had to wade through to figure out what they needed to do to export to this market.  That has been reduced down to about 12 pages.”

McEndaffer added key to the success of this effort was USDA being open to industry input.

“FSIS reached out to various industry associations including USMEF to review the export library and provide feedback on onerous requirements and where we saw areas that needed to be clarified based on our understanding of new or updated Canadian regulations and that hopefully provided a baseline of information that FSIS used in their discussions with CFA,” McEndaffer continued.

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