Japan mulls meatpacker errors

TOKYO (AP)--Japanese government officials Dec. 7 began assessing a U.S. government report recommending corrective steps to be taken by a U.S. meatpacker that made a shipment last month without proper documentation, an official said.

On Nov. 8, Japan halted beef imports from Swift & Co.'s plant in Greeley, Colo., after a shipment from the facility arrived in the western city of Osaka without proper documentation.

The "inappropriate shipment" originated from the plant's offal department where sorting of offal products was taking place, Japan's Agriculture Ministry said on its website, citing a report by the Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service.

The box in question was derived from cattle under 21 months of age and presents no risk to food safety, the company has said. At present, Tokyo limits the trade to meat from cows aged 20 months or younger that are handled by a select list of U.S. meat exporters.

Corrective measures proposed by Swift's Greeley plant include reprogramming scanning software to lock up the inventory scanning system when unauthorized product codes for shipments to Japan are identified, the report said.

Other steps the report recommended for the plant include running products destined for Japan on a dedicated packaging line, and performing verification scans, manual audits and visual label verifications of shipments, it said.

Officials began assessing the proposed corrective steps, which were recently sent to the Japanese government, said Agriculture Ministry official Takafumi Ono.

Ono said, however, it was not yet known "for now" how soon Japan will send a delegation to the Greeley plant to review whether it is following rules for export to Japan before allowing trade to resume.

Japan initially banned U.S. beef in December 2003 after the first reported case of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy in a U.S. herd. The country eased the ban in July after U.S. and Japanese officials agreed to a deal that included strict restrictions and stringent checks at U.S. meat processing plants.

But many Japanese remain worried about BSE a degenerative nerve disease found in older cattle that has been linked to the rare but fatal human variant Creutzfeldt-Jabob disease, and feel uneasy about U.S. safeguard measures.

The report said the audits by both FSIS and USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service have verified that the Swift plant's identification requirements and procedures for carcasses and approved finished products bound for Japan "are satisfactory and implemented as designed."

Date: 12/28/06

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