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The Oireachtas agriculture committee inquiry into the handling of the pork dioxin crisis is to open this morning at Leinster House. Today's meeting is the first of a series of hearings which the committee will be holding in the coming weeks in order to investigate the issues surrounding the contamination of Irish pork products and consider how the difficulties now facing this industry might be overcome.

The Council adopted codified versions of two Directives laying down minimum standards for the protection of calves (8713/1/08) and pigs (8719/1/08). Directive 91/629/EEC (calves) and Directive 91/630/EEC (pigs) were substantially amended several times. They were codified for reasons of clarity and rationalisation.

On December 23, 2008 Ukraine’s Parliament (the Rada) adopted two draft laws with the intent to reduce imports and restrict trade in red meat and poultry by imposing tariff increases above WTO-agreed bound rates. These drafts may be signed into law by the President as early as mid-January.

In the US state of North Caroline rules banning waste ponds on new and expanded hog farms and setting higher standards for alternative waste disposal systems have taken effect.

South Korea and Japan reopened their markets to Chilean pork, according to a release in Seoul from the Ministry of Agriculture and Food.

Wang Zhicai, director of the ministry's department of stock breeding said that live pig, milk and other major livestock products had experienced constant drops in price in 2008, and the weakness was expected to continue in the new year. Statistics from the ministry showed that by November 2008, the average pork price had been falling for nine months in a row, down 25.4 percent compared with its peak in February.

EFSA’s Task Force on Zoonoses Data Collection has published an analysis of the risk factors related to Salmonella in slaughter pigs within the European Union (EU). Whilst the results revealed that Salmonella infected pigs were more likely to lead to Salmonella contaminated carcasses, these could also come from uninfected pigs. Moreover, the Salmonella carcass contamination was more likely to happen in some slaughterhouses than in others.

Livestock farmers are amongst those targeted by the Health and Safety Executive’s (HSE) latest safety campaign, which aims to prevent deaths and serious injuries in the agriculture industry. The HSE has launched the ‘Make the promise. Come home safe’ campaign in a bid to reduce the number of fatal accidents on farms.

The CONffIDENCE project aims to further improve food safety in Europe by the development of faster and more cost-efficient methods for the detection of a wide range of chemical contaminants in different food and feed commodities.

Leading meat industry representatives from farmers through to retailers have come together to form an environmental taskforce to develop an environmental ‘roadmap’ for the sector. The Meat Roadmap will give the industry the tools it needs to address a broad range of environmental issues in addition to carbon across the product supply chain.

The USA will supply 750 thousand tons of poultry and 100 thousand tons of pork to Russia in 2009. The figures mentioned above represent new quotas agreed by specialists of Russia and the USA.

A new venture to benchmark the cost of labour for particular tasks in British pig production has gained funding from BPEX’s Innovation Fund. The technique was originally developed to help bring down costs in the dairy industry. It is the first time the labour efficiency scheme has been applied to the pig sector.

European Comission has adopted the decision to include Sicily in the list of Italian regions free of swine vesicular disease.

European Union pigmeat production is forecast to be down 3 percent next year.

Following the detection of the Ebola-Reston virus in pigs in the Philippines, FAO, OIE and WHO announced that the government of the Philippines has requested the three agencies send an expert mission to work with human and animal health experts in the Philippines to further investigate the situation.