March 3, 2004

Mexico Ready To Lift US Beef Ban

The United States and Mexico are close to reaching an agreement on lifting Mexico's ban on American beef due to mad cow disease, a top U.S. Agriculture Department official said on Tuesday.

USDA Undersecretary Bill Hawks told reporters the department hopes Mexico will allow shipments of some U.S. beef products "within days."

Hawks' statement was somewhat at odds with Mexico's animal health chief, Javier Trujillo, who on Monday said the import ban would remain in place for at least another two weeks.

Mexico, the No. 2 buyer of American beef, shut its borders after the discovery of the first U.S. case of mad cow disease in late December.

"I think we are extremely close," Hawks said on the sidelines of a national conference of U.S. soybean and corn growers. "It's one of those things that you have basic agreement, and then those final details sometimes take longer."

USDA officials have expressed frustration with Mexico's slowness to resume imports. Hawks said the discussions with Mexico were like taking "three steps forward and four back."

Mexican health officials will visit four U.S. meat plants next week to ensure new deboning methods help stop the spread of mad cow disease.

Mexico has opposed lifting the ban until U.S. meat plants switched to manual deboning, one of six measures the USDA pledged to implement to contain the spread of the disease.

Mexican agriculture officials have approved the deboning technique but cannot lift the ban on U.S. beef until health officials also agree.

The mad cow disorder, also called bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) and linked to the deadly human variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD), devastated Britain's livestock industry in the 1990s. Some 130 people have died from vCJD in Europe.