January 5, 2007

 

USDA proposal draws ire of US cattle group R-CALF

 

 

A proposal by the US Department of Agriculture's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) on Thursday (Jan 4) that would allow imports of older cattle from Canada drew the ire of one large US cattle organisation.

 

"This proposed rule is but a collection of guesswork on the part of USDA," said Bill Bullard, CEO of R-CALF United Stockgrowers of America, shortly after an APHIS conference call to announce the proposal concluded. It attempts to ignore common sense, he said.

 

The APHIS proposal would allow cattle older than 30 months of age to be imported into the US for any purpose from countries designated to be at minimal risk introducing bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or

mad cow disease. Currently, Canada is the only country with such a minimal-risk designation, the USDA said.

 

The US allows Canadian cattle that are younger than 30 months of age to be imported directly for slaughter or to a single feedlot for feeding prior to slaughter.

 

In the conference call, APHIS said one cannot look at individual risk-mitigation measures to determine the effectiveness of the whole set of barriers to transmitting BSE. All measures must be taken as a group.

 

However, Bullard said, "common sense would tell you that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link," and the weak link here is the ban on feeding rendered ruminant by-products back to ruminants.

 

The feed bans currently in place in Canada and the US have been criticised by international review teams as being inadequate, Bullard said. Even the US Food and Drug Administration and the Canadian Food Inspection Service have identified the feed bans as being areas that could be shored up, he said.

 

A series of "talking points" from R-CALF said importing cattle from Canada where half of its eight cases (nine if the US Washington State cow is counted) were in cattle that were born after the country instituted its own

feed ban, would water down the US herd in the eyes of foreign beef customers.

 

Joe Schuele, director of trade media for the National Caattlemen's Beef Association (NCBA), said the organisation was just getting a look at the proposed rule for the first time. Staff and elected officers for the NCBA would need to study them and present the information to members at the annual convention in Nashville in early February so the members could develop policy, he said.

 

There are scientific and economic factors that will need to be studied, Schuele said. And the members will want to debate these issues.