Probe into cheap US chicken conducted

The Department of Livestock will probe into whether US chicken thighs sold at 20,000 VND (0.92 USD) per kilogramme in Vietnam can be considered dumping and if there is trade fraud in this case, said Deputy Director of the department Nguyen Van Trong.

Trong said at a press conference on August 5 that the livestock associations of the Southeast region and Dong Nai province filed petitions for an anti-dumping investigation into frozen chicken thighs from the US.

Most imported chicken thighs in Vietnam currently hail from the US, he said, noting that the products are sold in the US at between 3-3.5 USD (65,000-75,000 VND) per kilo.

The fact that US chicken thighs are priced at 20,000 VND per kg in Vietnam is quite surprising, he said, adding that products near their expiry dates are usually cheap in the US and Vietnamese agencies need to examine the quality of US-origin imports.

Domestic consumers are questioning the quality of US chicken thighs as surveys by Vietnamese companies show that the product is being sold at much higher prices in the US than in Vietnam, said Phung Huu Hao – Deputy Director of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development’s Agro-Forestry-Fisheries Quality Assurance Department.

If companies imported cheap frozen thighs and labelled false expiry dates, it is trade fraud, he noted.

Hao continued to say that during a working visit to the US in late 2014, the ministry detected food safety regulation violations in several food production facilities. It also sent a report on the issues to the US Department of Agriculture and the US side acknowledged all the violations specified in the report.-VNA