May 20, 2004

US, Japan Talks On Beef Import Ban End Without Resolution

A visiting U.S. scientific team hoping to pry open Japan's markets to U.S. beef imports concluded two days of meetings with Japanese experts Wednesday. But the two sides failed to resolve a dispute over safeguards against mad cow disease.
 
Dr. Peter Fernandez, the Agriculture Department official who led the U.S. team, said scientists exchanged "frank and open" views on testing and other controls for the deadly illness, known formally as bovine spongiform encephalopathy.
 
They disagreed on some topics, he said in a statement, without offering specifics.
 
Japan imposed a ban on U.S. beef on Dec. 24, 2003, after the discovery of the first U.S. case of mad cow disease. Japan, the most lucrative overseas market for U.S. beef before the ban, was one of 30 nations to suspend imports.
 
Tokyo says it would not allow U.S. beef back into the country until Washington starts testing every slaughtered cow for the brain-wasting disease, a measure Japan introduced after finding its own domestic mad cow case in 2001. Japan has since found 11 cases of mad cow.
 
But U.S. officials say scientific evidence shows blanket testing for the disease is not necessary.
 
Fernandez said U.S. scientists toured a slaughterhouse in central Gunma prefecture Tuesday to see what Japan was doing to prevent possibly infected cow parts from ending up on people's dinner tables.
 
Consumers' appetite for beef in Japan declined sharply after the domestic discovery of mad cow. But beef sales have recovered since the government began testing all Japanese cattle.
 
Eating beef from a diseased cow is thought to cause the fatal human variant, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.
 
The U.S. supplied 30% of all beef consumed in Japan before the import ban went into effect.