June 22, 2004

 

 

Japan's BSE Demands Dividing U.S. Cattle Industry

 

Japan's continued insistence that the U.S. test all cattle for bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) at slaughter is creating a divide in the cattle industry.

 

Scientists agree that BSE, commonly called mad cow disease, does not develop in cattle until about 30 months of age.

 

Therefore, testing all slaughter cattle for BSE is scientifically unjustified and cost prohibitive, Greg Doud chief economist for the National Cattlemen's Beef Association (NCBA) told Farm Bureau county vice presidents at last week's Midyear Conference in West Des Moines.

 

"There is a fundamental misunderstanding between the U.S. and Japan about beef safety because of differences in the production system," Doud said.

 

He said most cattle slaughtered in Japan are 30 months old or older. U.S. slaughter cattle are generally 15 to 18 months old, well before BSE infects the animal.

However, James Wilson, director of technical services for Creekstone Farms Premium Beef, said individual packers should be permitted to implement their own 100 percent testing programs to meet the demands of their customers.

 

"What industry can go around telling its customers what it can and can't do for them?" he asked. "It's just like 'natural' beef versus regular beef. There's no inherent claim that one is safer than the other. It's a perception.

 

"That's what we want to market to."

 

Japan was the largest export market for U.S. beef before last year's discovery of a single BSE-infected cow in Washington state. The country subsequently closed its borders to U.S. beef until its food safety concerns were met.

 

Nearly one-quarter of the premium Black Angus beef processed at Creekstone's Arkansas City, Kan., plant was exported to Japan before the BSE incident, Wilson said.

 

The privately-owned plant's daily kill includes an average of 100 to 150 head of cattle from Iowa every day, he reported.

 

Earlier this year, the company's request to test 100 percent of its own cattle in order to resume exports to Japan was denied by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Creekstone is challenging the decision.

 

The company proposes to test more than 300,000 head of cattle annually at a cost of less than $6 million. Creekstone's customers have offered to pay for the cost of the equipment and testing, Wilson said.

 

However, Doud said testing for non-scientific reasons is a bad idea.

 

"You have to understand why tested beef isn't safer than untested beef," he said.

 

BSE testing is a valuable surveillance method for tracking the disease in the U.S. cattle herd, but it is not a measure of food safety, explained Dr. James Roth, a professor in Iowa State University's College of Veterinary Medicine. He said testing cattle less than 30 months old has little value and could actually harm the industry if false positives were reported.

 

"Using the test on animals that you expect to test negative can cause very expensive problems," he said.

 

The USDA has implemented several effective "firewalls" to prevent the further spread of BSE, including a ban on feeding meat and bone meal to ruminants, the removal of specified risk materials at slaughter and diverting high-risk cattle from the human food supply, Roth pointed out.

 

"With these in place, even if we have additional cases of BSE, it won't spread animal-to-animal and it won't get into the human food chain," he said. "We have to convince our trading partners that our firewalls are solid."

 

If even one company is allowed to perform 100 percent testing, it will soon be demanded industry-wide and cattlemen will ultimately bear the costs, Doud predicted.

 

"We could decide today to test only for Japan; but if we made that decision, we would be testing all 35 million head that we slaughter because every retailer would go that direction," he said.

 

At an estimated cost of $30 per head, the total cost testing would surpass $1 billion, Doud estimated.