Rapid City Journal - March 28, 2005
By Steve Miller, Journal Staff Writer, and The Associated Press
PIERRE -- The decision by Japanese officials to stop testing all their domestic cattle for mad cow disease could pave the way to reopening the Japanese market to U.S. beef, South Dakota Agriculture Secretary Larry Gabriel said Monday.
Japan's Food Safety Commission on Monday ruled that relaxing domestic cattle testing standards for mad cow disease won't put consumers at risk.
The commission found that tests for the fatal illness in cattle ages 20 months or younger were unable to detect the proteins linked to mad cow disease, known scientifically as bovine spongiform encephalopathy. Scientists believe the proteins associated with BSE do not accumulate in cows that young.
Gabriel, who returned March 17 from a trade trip to Japan and South Korea, called the ruling good news.
"We were told at the embassy in Tokyo that it was going to be hard to get U.S. beef imported into Japan without all the animals being tested because they were testing all their animals in Japan," Gabriel said Monday in a phone interview.
Japan has tested all cattle for mad cow disease since discovering its first case in 2001. Japan has found 16 animals with the disease, most recently, a Holstein cow on Sunday.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has urged Japan to accept meat from animals slaughtered younger than 21 months old without testing for BSE. For that to happen, Japan first would have to drop its own blanket testing, as it did Monday, Gabriel said.
Gabriel said officials at the U.S. embassy and U.S. Meat Export Federation officials he met on his visit to Tokyo were optimistic that Japan would reopen the border to U.S. beef. Japan banned U.S. beef after a cow in Washington state was found with mad cow disease in December 2003, even though the cow originated in Canada.
Gabriel said he came away from his trip hopeful about the border reopening, particularly after talking with restaurateurs and grocers in Tokyo who want U.S. beef for their customers again.
"Those people were desperate," Gabriel said. "They wanted U.S. beef, and they wanted it bad."
Japanese customers don't like U.S. beef as well as domestic Japanese beef, which, he said is "marbled to the ‘nth' degree." Japanese cows are raised slowly, fed beer and even given massages. But beef raised in Japan costs $90 to $120 a pound.
And Japanese consumers like American beef much better than Australian beef, which is cheaper but has virtually no marbling, Gabriel said. U.S. beef typically would sell for $10 to $25 a pound in Japan, he said.
Gabriel said the restaurant and grocery store owners he spoke with were interested in the SOUTH DAKOTA CERTIFIED™ Beef program because it would guarantee traceability of the beef all the way from the ranchers' pasture through the feedlot and the slaughterhouse. It would also be able to guarantee the age of the animal slaughtered. Japan and South Korea have laws requiring traceability, he said.
Gov. Mike Rounds has backed the SOUTH DAKOTA CERTIFIED™ Beef program, which is expected this summer to begin delivering premium beef certified as being raised in South Dakota under strict rules.
Ranchers already have signed up for the program. Some have begun attaching electronic identification devices to ear tags in order to trace the animals throughout the production cycle.
The state Agriculture department is nearly finished writing rules for those who participate in the SOUTH DAKOTA CERTIFIED™ Beef program, Gabriel said Monday. The rules include South Dakota's strict ban against feeding ruminant (sheep and cattle) animal parts back to cattle. Animal scientists say BSE is spread primarily by cattle eating feed containing BSE-contaminated parts from other ruminants.
Gabriel also said he and South Dakota Wheat Commission representatives met with South Korean officials who were interested in the high- selenium wheat grown in western South Dakota.
