The Spanish meat industry could lose a large part of its business in Mexico, one of its most important markets. After last year the Aztec nation questioned the quality of Spanish meat and forced it to pass new controls, it seems the situation has unraveled. The health ministry has suspended two of the three slaughterhouses, and a total of about 400 companies have filed, Only 130 have managed to pass the first screening to be able to re-export.
Now, approved plants must be audited on-site by Mexican health authorities, who will consider whether these slaughterhouses meet clean and sanitary requirements for export to the country. However, no date has been fixed for when these will be made.
last year mexico gave A six-month period until next April to manage the audit of Spanish slaughterhouses since failures in “hygienic aspects” and food safety problems were detected. As a result of this and because of the tight deadline, the Ministry of Agriculture had to ask for help from the Ministry of Health to be able to comply with the time imposed by Mexico, and thus lighten the pre-listing process.
need to extend the deadline
Last internal communication issued by ANIS (National Association of the Meat Industry of Spain), and to which you had access economists.eswarns of his concern and asks to “ask the Mexican authorities” Extension of time granted in view of the rigorous and complex process being followed by the Spanish authorities To guarantee that the selected establishments meet all the requirements demanded by Mexico”.
The employer calls for “the preparation of a single list of establishments for submission to the Mexican authorities, requiring companies to notify immediately upon detection of non-conformities”. The said statement also “needs to conduct an information session for establishments with a questionnaire, with a focus on detecting common weaknesses and adopting appropriate corrective measures.” Even though the difficulties are increasing because Traceability problems would also have been detected.
In fact, Ennis admits in one of his reports that “from the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food they report that recently there are some containers that have been exported to Mexico with export certificates in which batch numbers are indicated. that do not correspond to the exported batch that appears in the label”. This is a problem because it is impossible to trace the origin of batches in case of hygiene issues.
quality standards
According to a statement from early January, meat employers indicate factors that will be taken into account for the audit such as “the level of demands of destination markets, number of activities, past history, identified potential problems, and company exports to certain markets or not, as it is difficult for operators that are not exporting to maintain the requirements and procedures required by certain export destinations”.
In the same document, Ennis states verbatim that “More dialogue with the sector was requested when defining procedures and agreeing criteria for actionIn addition, the document ensures that “from the Ministry of Health, companies were asked to ‘take care of the entire export environment’, and that they would favor the ‘positive’ development of our foreign trade in this area”. , remains open to our contributions and suggestions.
