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QUESTIONS FROM CONGRESSMAN CHARLES CANADY 



Q. Ambassador Kantor, I am concerned about the regulations that 

 the U.S. government has placed on the American agriculture 

 producer in order to guarantee that the commodity produced is 

 safe and nutritious. We have heard that Mexico has Sanitary and 

 Phytosanitary standards that are comparable to America's. Also 

 the pesticide regulations and environmental standards are 

 similar. However, the enforcement structure is not in place to 

 ensure that production tools that are banned in the United States 

 because of health and safety concerns, are not being used in 

 Mexican agricultural production. How will the NAFTA agreement 

 provide guarantees that imported citrus products, tomatoes etc. 

 are being produced in a manner that meats American standards? 



A. All food products imported from Mexico — or from any other 

 country — must comply with Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) 

 tolerance regulations for residues in food and with all other 

 U.S. regulatory agency requirements. The NAFTA will not change 

 any of these requirements. 



The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the U.S. 

 Department of Agriculture (USDA) (for meat, poultry and eggs) 

 have primary responsibility for monitoring imports for 

 compliance, and for taking enforcement action. These inspection 

 and enforcement functions will in no way be weakened by NAFTA. 



Q. What process will be established to monitor pesticide use? 

 In the case of EBDC's it was proven that residue levels at the 

 farm gate were much higher than in the market basket study which 

 showed basically undetectable levels. There are many pesticides 

 that are banned in the U.S. that can be used by Mexican 

 producers. Given the make-up of the product, no residues will 

 be discovered by the time the product reaches the inspection 

 sight at the border. Are we going to set up a new inspection and 

 monitoring process through this agreement to address this 

 problem? 



A. Because of the large volume of imported foods coming from 

 Mexico, FDA devotes a substantial portion of its monitoring 

 efforts to Mexican products. For example, more than a quarter of 

 the imported food samples collected by FDA annually for pesticide 

 residup surveillance are from Mexico. While FDA monitoring 

 reports indicate that Mexican compliance has tended to improve 

 over the years, the violation rate for Mexican produce is 

 generally higher than the violation rate for domestic produce 

 tested by FDA. 



