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Japan moves toward easing test-all plan
Expert panel recommends testing only 'young' cattle
By Richard Hanson
DTN Japan Correspondent
TOKYO (DTN)--A truce is nearer in the U.S.-Japan mad cow war.
Recently, DTN reported the Japanese government was ready to make a key concession--a genuine breakthrough, in fact--in a dispute over how to lift Japan's ban American beef imports. Japan banned U.S. beef last December after USDA announced America's first case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE).
On July 16, the breakthrough finally happened.
A Japanese government experts' panel on BSE reported that excluding "young" cattle (how young was left unclear) from the nation's current strict "test-all" policy of slaughterhouse screening for signs of the disease would pose little risk to human beings.
This is important to the U.S. for two reasons.
First, younger cows are less likely to have developed the prions (a type of protein) that are believed to cause the deadly disease in cattle.
Second, most of the beef the U.S. wants to once again export to Japan (until last year over a US$ 1 billion per year) is from relatively young animals. An estimated 80 percent of beef cattle are slaughtered before 20 months old.
So far, so good. But, both U.S. and Japanese officials know the hard part in reaching a final agreement to open the beef trade, even partially, will depend on an a mutual agreement literally on the "guts" of the beef trade--the treatment of Specified Risk Materials (SRMs). This includes everything in a cow from the intestines to the spinal cord and brain where the BSE prions are most often lurking.
From Japan's point of view, that means scraping or cutting off all SRMs. This is more or less what the U.S. agreed to do in partially re-opening beef exports to its neighbor Mexico, delivering SRM-free cuts of meat.
Those are the issues that will weigh heavily next week in Tokyo when a working group of U.S. and Japanese officials and experts hold their third (and last scheduled) meeting to iron out an agreement leading to the resumption of U.S. beef imports.
After the July meeting, there will be final meeting of very senior government officials to reach an agreement on when and how U.S. beef imports can resume.
At the same time, Japan is negotiating the end of America's ban on Japanese beef imports, which has been in place for several years--first because of hoof and mouth disease and then after Japan's first of a total so far of 11 BSE cases starting in September 2001.
The July 16 report recommending the exclusion of young cows from testing will be adopted by the experts' powerful Cabinet-level Food Safety Commission (FSC). That, in turn, will enable the government to retreat from its politically troublesome policy of testing all cattle for BSE.
Based on the panel's conclusion, the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF) and the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare (MHLW) will work out specific measures to end blanket testing for the brain-wasting disease.
Officials in both ministries appear relieved to discard the test-all policy. MAFF sees the policy as wasteful. By testing only cattle over the age of 24 months, for example, they can cut the number of tests (now 1.3 million a year) by 30-40 percent, eliminating expense and the frequent false "positive" readings from the initial screen tests.
But MAFF is also wary of a potential backlash from consumers, whose voices have been heeded more often since before the first outbreak of BSE. The subsequent political pressure resulted in an internal reorganization of the Ministry that obliges officials to be more consumer friendly.
Friday's report is one crucial step in resolving what has become an acrimonious bilateral dispute. Japan has insisted a resumption of U.S. beef imports will depend on the U.S. adopting the equivalent of a "test-all" cattle policy on beef bound for the Japanese consumer--America's biggest foreign market for its beef.
That turned out to be easier said than done.
In Europe, the test is conducted on cattle aged 30 months or older. Some Japanese scientists are calling for a review of the current tight policy, saying it is meaningless to test young cattle. Tokyo is inclined to exclude cows younger than around 20 months from tests for the disease. The problem is that in the U.S. there is no reliable measure of just how old are the cattle being brought to slaughter. U.S. beef farmers don't have a uniform system of tracking animals for birth to the feeding lot to the slaughterhouse. Verification of age is unreliable and often still depends on reading the age from teeth.
In the end, since about 80 percent of beef cattle are slaughtered before 20 months of age, Japan might be flexible and just accept that the exportable U.S. beef is younger than 20 months.
But keep in mind the experts judged that detection of the disease in cows younger than a certain age is difficult under the current testing method because it uses brain tissues as test samples. The draft report states the risk of human infection will "not increase by exempting young cows from the test if brain, spinal cord and other body parts believed to be the source of infection are removed" when slaughtering cows.
That makes the removal of all SRMs all the more important to Japanese negotiators. That will be a possible sticking point at next week's meetings. There is no clear definition of young cows.
On July 15, U.S. Ambassador to Japan Howard Baker told reporters that although he cannot predict when, he expects Japan to lift the ban on U.S. beef imports in "the immediate future."
Baker also said he believes cows younger than 30 months will be excluded from tests for BSE once the lifting of the ban on U.S. beef imports is agreed to by Tokyo and Washington. The experts' panel didn't leave the Food Safety Commission any specific definition of young cows either.
The question is whether the mad cow war truce will hold.
Date: 7/21/04
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