April 29, 2004

South Korea Delegation To Inspect US Meatpackers

A delegation of South Korean government officials will visit the U.S. in early May to make sure that U.S. packing facilities have adopted new measures to safeguard against bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad-cow disease, a U.S. Department of Agriculture undersecretary said Wednesday.

"They're going to evaluate our amelioration measures," said J.B. Penn, head of USDA's Farm and Foreign Agriculture Services. "They're going to go to some processing plants to see how we've implemented those."

In response to the December discovery of a BSE-infected cow in Washington state, the USDA announced new regulations that ban meat of non-ambulatory, or "downer" animals, from the human food supply, expand the types of bovine tissue considered to be a risk of carrying BSE and further restrict advanced meat-recovery technology to scrape meat from carcass bones.

South Korea, traditionally the third-largest foreign market for U.S. beef, enacted a ban shortly after the U.S. announced the BSE case.

The U.S. exported 228,785 metric tons of beef to South Korea last year, worth about $751 million, according to USDA data compiled by the U.S. Meat Export Federation.