July 15, 2004

USDA To Send High-Level BSE Delegation To Japan In Aug For Talks

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is planning to send Undersecretary for Farm and Foreign Agriculture Services J.B. Penn and others to Tokyo in August to meet with officials there in hopes of ending Japan's ban on U.S. beef, USDA spokesman Ed Loyd said.

USDA Secretary Ann Veneman said Wednesday she was encouraged by the fact that Japan and the U.S. are cooperating in an ongoing series of technical meetings on Japan's ban and the case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad-cow disease, the U.S. discovered in December. She told U.S. lawmakers in the House of Representatives she is hopeful about the outcome.

"We are hopeful that we will find a way to allow us to ... ship beef into the Japanese market without testing every animal (for BSE)," Veneman said at a hearing held jointly by the House Agriculture and Government Reform committees.

USDA Undersecretary J.B. Penn has told reporters twice in recent months that negotiations with Japan will likely result in beef trade resuming this summer.

Veneman said Wednesday that up until Japan and the U.S. agreed to hold the three bilateral technical meetings, "It was clear we weren't making any progress."

Still, she refused to predict for lawmakers when or if Japan would lift its ban on U.S. beef.

Japan, which is traditionally the largest foreign market for U.S. beef, banned it in December after the USDA announced the discovery of a case of BSE. The U.S. exported 352,448 metric tons of beef to Japan in 2003, worth about $1.3 billion, according to USDA data compiled by the U.S. Meat Export Federation.

The first U.S.-Japan round of technical talks was held in Tokyo on May 18-19 and the second round was held in the U.S. in late June. The third in the series of three planned will be held in Tokyo later this month.