Nearly 1million support our campaign NOW SIGN THE PETITION

ALMOST one million people have now signed a petition calling on the Government to protect British food standards from inferior foreign imports such as chlorinewashed chicken.

The Mail on Sunday’s campaign to keep controversial US food products off our supermarket shelves has given fresh impetus to the plea by the National Farmers’ Union.

Minette Batters, president of the NFU, said: ‘I’m absolutely overwhelmed by the response. It shows the strength of feeling that people have about what is going in to their fridges and ovens.

‘As well as the petition, we are aware of 80,000 emails which have been sent to MPs. It shows it is not just farmers who are worried about this trade deal, it’s people from all walks of life who care about their food, protecting the countryside and standing up for rural Britain.’

The petition demands that the Government ‘ensure that all food eaten in the UK – whether in our homes, schools, hospitals, restaurants or from shops – is produced in a way that matches the high standards of production expected of UK farmers’.

Meanwhile, the boss of the Food Standards Agency (FSA) has issued a thinly veiled warning to Ministers pushing for a US trade deal that she will not allow political pressure to reduce UK standards. In a letter to MPs, Heather Hancock said the i ndependent regulator will be ‘putting the interests of the consumer first’ amid a Cabinet row over whether to allow chlorinewashed chicken and hormone-fed beef to be imported from the US.

Ms Hancock, who has headed the

FSA since 2016, wrote: ‘As a nonministerial government department and independent public body, the decisions we make on behalf of consumers are and will continue to be based purely on the latest science and evidence, and not on wider political or other pressures.’

She added: ‘We have developed a new UK process for authorising regulated products, such as additives for food and feed and novel foods. It is this risk analysis that would be applied to any consideration of the rules around chemical washes of meat, for example.’

However, Ms Hancock also wrote that the FSA’s post-Brexit decisionmaking process will consider animal welfare concerns.