During the course of an interview with Sky News’s Sophy Ridge on 23 February 2020, George Eustice, the newly appointed Secretary of State for the Environment, was asked about the likelihood of imports of chlorinated chicken from America. While he reiterated that chlorinated chicken was “illegal” under current EU law, he seemed unable to categorically deny the possibility of future imports as an outcome of post-Brexit trade deals between the UK and the US. In the meantime, many in Britain fear that the US might insist on exporting chlorinated chicken to British markets as a precondition for successful trade negotiations.
The stakes are high, given that the chicken industry is a major player in the world of American animal agriculture and a significant contributor to the US economy. The US happens to be the world’s largest producer of broiler chickens (chickens reared for meat), as well as the second largest exporter, after Brazil. Americans are themselves the world’s largest consumers per capita of chicken and chicken products.
These almost insatiable demands for food in the form of chicken have led to the adoption of mass production methods. The US has led the way in developing industrial methods of animal agriculture. But this approach has potential trade-offs. Even as far back as 1906, Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle highlighted insanitary conditions in Chicago meat-packing plants and led to the Federal Meat Inspection Act that year. The Act led to regulation of the sanitary conditions for the slaughter of animals, such as cattle, and the processing of meat and meat products.
Economies of scale dictate that the means by which chicken are reared, slaughtered and processed have become centralised. The National Chicken Council, based in Washington DC, is the trade association for America’s chicken industry. It represents “vertically integrated chicken producers and processors, who raise and process 95 percent of the chicken in the United States”. Independent farmers now work under contract to large and powerful chicken production and processing companies, which control all stages of production-from hatcheries, feed mills, slaughterhouses and transportation networks. Much larger numbers of chickens are now reared in much smaller spaces and with reduced amounts of feed, thereby lowering overall production costs and providing the American consumer with a cheaper product.
Factory farming may cause overcrowding and thereby lead to lower standards of animal welfare, including poor hygiene and inadequate sanitation. There is an increased risk of infection and cross-infection among intensively farmed broiler chickens. In order to protect consumers from food-borne pathogens, it has thus become standard practice in the US to rinse or spray the carcasses of slaughtered chickens with various antimicrobial chemicals. The US Department of Agriculture has approved several antimicrobial rinses, including chlorine dioxide (dissolved in water to form chlorinated water), cetylpyridium chloride, peracetic acid, acidified sodium chlorite, organic acids (such as lactic acid), bromine and other chemicals, for this purposes. This use of chemicals, often referred to as “pathogen reduction treatment”, is meant to compensate for any possible breaches of hygiene in the supply chain. The American approach thus differs somewhat from the EU’s insistence on maintaining uniform standards of hygiene throughout the production process, in the so-called “farm to fork” or “plough to plate” approach.
Chlorinated water, in particular, is meant to help reduce such pathogens as Escherichia coli, Salmonella and Campylobacter. A study, conducted by Professor William Keevil and his team of microbiologists at Southampton University, was published in the American online journal mBio in 2018 and appears to cast some doubt on the benefits of such chemical treatment. The authors demonstrated that certain bacteria, including Listeria and Salmonella, remain active even after contaminated spinach is washed with chlorinated water. This study, by extrapolation to animals, may mean that chlorination is not particularly effective.
Questions have also arisen about the safety of chlorinated chicken. The European Food Safety Authority, however, has “no safety concerns” with the chlorination of chicken, despite any theoretical risks of toxicity caused by chlorite and chlorate by-products of chlorine dioxide. Nonetheless, the EU banned the import of American chlorine-treated poultry in 1997 over other concerns, related to lower animal welfare, sanitary and food safety standards in the US chicken industry. This ban is currently backed by the British Poultry Council and was upheld by all member states on the EU Agricultural Council in 2008 except the UK, which abstained. Under current EU regulations, only cold air and water are permitted to be used for the decontamination of poultry carcasses.
There is some support for chlorinated chicken imports within free-trade libertarian organisations and think tanks. The Adam Smith Institute, for example, produced a supportive report in 2017, titled “Chlorinated Chicken: Why you should’t give a cluck”, which made the point that the risks of chlorinated chicken were largely theoretical and remain unproven.
Whatever the eventual outcome, it remains clear that any ongoing debate about chlorinated chicken will be largely framed as a battle between overriding commercial interests and the wider issue of animal welfare, rather than simply focusing on the efficacy and safety of chemical rinsing of poultry carcasses alone. A lot will depend on the responses of both British politicians, as well as the wider public, favourable or otherwise, to any future imports of chemically-treated poultry.
Ashis Banerjee