Apparently Brazilian chicken has a certain salmonella problem:

Brazil is the largest exporter of frozen chicken in the world, exporting $750m-worth of the meat to Europe last year. But about one in five of its birds are contaminated with the food poisoning bug salmonella.

Presumably someone will want to do something about this. The question being, what?

The EU has been running a major salmonella reduction programme for more than a decade for its domestic poultry flocks. In the UK high standards and close monitoring meant that salmonella rates ranged from 1.5% to 2.2% between 2013 and 2017, according to the Food Standards Agency (FSA).

Given the effort invested there it would appear that there is no method of ensuring zero salmonella in chicken. Sure, a reduction of a one in five to a one in fifty chance of said infection is pretty good but those are still odds which should lead us to be careful in handling raw carcasses, making sure they’re fully cooked before consumption and so on.

Given this impossibility of elimination of the problem perhaps it’s possible to manage it in some manner? For example, why not a rinse in a light chlorine wash? As the Americans do to their chicken and as we do to our bagged salads. There is that EU insistence that we must never do this because reasons but those reasons are never really made very clear. Except that rather cynical idea that the chicken producers of Europe really don’t want to have to compete with the American ones.

But then when discussing the politics of trade the correct thing to wonder about is “Are we being cynical enough?” rather than any worry that we might be too much so.