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US, Japan agree to BSE talks
TOKYO (AP)--The U.S. and Japanese agriculture chiefs agreed Jan. 15 to hold further talks aimed at lifting Tokyo's ban on U.S. beef imports, beginning with Washington's dispatch of a negotiating team to Japan next week, the Japanese government said.
Japanese Agriculture Minister Yoshiyuki Kamei and U.S. Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman reached the agreement during telephone talks Jan. 15, said Taketsugu Akahane, a ministry spokesman.
"The talks between the secretary and myself can be seen as the first step" toward lifting the beef ban, Akahane quoted Kamei as telling reporters.
Japan, along with dozens of other nations, banned imports of U.S. beef last month after the discovery of the bovine illness in a cow in Washington state.
Japan is the world's most lucrative market for U.S. beef, importing about US$1 billion worth of American beef and beef products a year.
Japan tests all of the 1.3 million cattle it slaughters every year for the brain-wasting bovine disease, and Tokyo is pressing Washington to adopt a similar system. American officials, however, say that blanket testing is unnecessary and would be too expensive for the much larger U.S. herd.
Kamei said that American safety measures "are not up to the standards of our country," but he said he hoped the U.S. mission expected in mid-January in Japan would make further proposals.
Whether Japan lifts the ban "depends on what they propose," Kamei said.
Bovine spongiform encephalopathy, is believed to spread by recycling meat and bones from infected animals back into cattle feed. The disease is thought to cause the fatal variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans who eat the infected beef. CJD kills its carrier by tearing holes in brain tissue.
Date: 1/22/04
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