Asunción, Dec 20 (EFE).- This Wednesday, Paraguay celebrated the shipment of a first shipment of 25.3 tons of beef to the United States after more than two decades, making it one of the 18 countries authorized to export this product to the US market.
The president of Paraguay, Santiago Peña, led an event in which the first containers bound for the United States were dispatched, on a day that he described as “historic.”
“This is just the beginning of the path of what Paraguay and Paraguayans are capable of doing,” said Peña from the Frigomerc meat processing plant, one of the nine certified by the US health authorities in the country.
In that sense, he assured that “getting here has been a hard road,” but warned that it is not the culmination but the beginning of a process.
“There have certainly been 7 years of certification, but it was 25 years of not having been able to export to the North American market,” he recalled.
The president considered that this opening “also symbolizes the strengthening of the bilateral relationship” and stressed that Paraguay “is a great ally” of the United States.
On the other hand, Peña invited his compatriots to make “greater efforts”, put more commitment and seriousness to take “the next step” of “dominating the meat market worldwide” and becoming “a protagonist.”
Among others, he suggested that national producers go out to conquer a “quota for Paraguay” in the US market.
According to a statement from the Ministry of Industry and Commerce, Paraguay now joins Canada, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Nicaragua, Uruguay and Argentina as a supplier within the “other countries” category, which They share a quota of 65,000 tons per year.
At the same event, the US ambassador in Asunción, Marc Ostfield, celebrated that Paraguay has become “one of the 18 countries in the world that have access to the US market.”
The diplomat considered that the certification by the Department of Agriculture (USDA, in English) “is also a testimony of the hard work” of the National Animal Quality and Health Service (Senacsa) and other Paraguayan institutions.
Last November 9, the US Embassy in Asunción reported in a statement that the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service of the Department of Agriculture had concluded the process of reviewing the regulations for the importation of fresh beef ( refrigerated or frozen) from Paraguay.
The decision was published on November 14 in the Federal Register, as the official gazette of the federal government is called in the United States, and came into force on December 14 of this year.EFE
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2023-12-20 14:45:01
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