We don’t have a bi-lateral “Free Trade Agreement” as we do with, say, Canada with China or Japan,
Excellent.
Mea culpa for not differentiating between the legal term and the trade fetish
Yeah, sorry for giving you a hard time for being so totally wrong.
We do have a “free trade policy”
Government rules mean we don't have free trade.
while we have to accept melamine from China
We have an agreement that says that? Could you cut and paste that section? Or will you be amending that statement too?
Nope.
The way food importation works goes like this: if you can’t produce a test to show that there’s a regulatory non-compliance in the imported foodstuff, animal feed, etc, you have no reason to push back on the importer. The regulation allows for us to cause a hold at the port of entry, destruction in situ or re-exportation of goods that fail to meet our regulations — but you must inspect and/or test at the port of entry to enforce these regulations.
Congress has never funded (and will never fund) APHIS or the FDA to perform enough testing of imported foodstuffs or feed - regardless of what particular foodstuff, feed, or material we’re talking about to pre-emptively sample and test prior to a shipment being accepted into the US. Less than 1% of foodstuffs coming into the US are inspected, and the stuff from China got inspected only after farmers started getting their livestock product kicked back from processing plants because domestic animals fed feedstuffs from China were kicked back. It took US producers crawling back up the chain to get any import enforcement out of the USDA/FDA, just as it took people’s pets dying to get any action on dog food imports.
This is diametrically opposed to how Japan handles feed/food imports. When we hay farmers out of Nevada would ship racehorse hay to Japan, it was required to be inspected here in the US first (by Japanese inspectors), at the exporter (inspections were per Japanese regs).
Then when it would get to the dock in Japan, they’d have a whole bunch of guys sampling and examining the hay being unloaded from the conex - one picture we had was of a dozen guys inspecting hay. Think of it like the DOT here in the US — four guys doing the actual work, one supervising and the rest standing around with their thumbs up their buttocks. But EVERY container with hay is inspected. There are no gaps.
And if they didn’t like it? If they found anything out of compliance with their animal feed regs?
The hay was shoved back in the container, buttoned up and sent back to the US - at the US producer’s expense.
We have nothing like that going on here, and will likely never have it.
Unless you can show at the point of importation that it is failing regulatory compliance, you have to accept it.
And as I’ve mentioned previously, “free trade” and “free markets” are the sort of mental masturbation in which libertarians love to engage. They don’t exist.