São Paulo – A delegation of the Saudi Food and Drug Authority (SFDA) is in Brazil to visit labs and cattle and poultry farms and slaughterhouses. In a statement released this Tuesday (2nd), the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Supply (Mapa) reports that the goal of the mission is to evaluate the reopening of the Saudi market to fresh and processed Brazilian beef, as well as the expansion of poultry purchases. The Saudis put an embargo in place on the import of Brazilian beef in 2012, but remain the main poultry importers from Brazil.
According to data from Mapa, technicians from SFDA will visit six beef production plants, two farms and one laboratory. Concerning poultry, it will be six production plants, one laboratory and one poultry farm.
According to the manager of Government Relations of the Arab Brazilian Chamber of Commerce, Tamer Mansour, the SFDA delegation is headed by the director of food and drug imports, Saleh Al Wassel, and will be divided in two teams for the inspections in Brazil. One of the teams will visit beef production plants in Mato Grosso and Pará states, besides the National Agriculture and Livestock Laboratory (Lanagro, in the Portuguese acronym) in the city of Recife, capital of Pernambuco state. This unit is specialized in tests of cattle diseases, especially foot-and-mouth disease (FMD).
The other team will go to the Lanagro lab of Campinas, São Paulo state, dedicated to the diagnosis of poultry diseases. They will also visit poultry meat plants in the states of Rio Grande do Sul and Paraná.
On Friday (12th), technicians from SFDA and the Ministry of Agriculture will meet in Brasília. According to Mansour, they will discuss the lifting of the embargo on the Brazilian beef. “The goal is the lifting of the beef embargo, but also to establish a partnership in the poultry sector. There’s a chance for exports to resume”, he said.
The Saudis stopped importing beef from Brazil at the end of 2012, after the Brazilian government reported that an animal in Paraná state that had died in 2010 was carrying the causing agent of the Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), known as “mad cow disease”. However, the animal died without developing the disease. At the time, several countries stopped imports from Brazilian beef and beef products, but resumed it soon after. Saudi Arabia, however, kept the embargo.
In April, a group from the SFDA was in Brazil and visited beef production plants. They visited the Lanagro from Minas Gerais, a farm and a slaughterhouse in São Paulo state.
Beef exports to the Arab country are suspended, but, on the other hand, the Saudis are the main importers of poultry from Brazil. In March of this year, they imported 60,500 tons, a 20% increase over the same period in 2014.
*Translated by Sérgio Kakitani
