November 16, 2004

 

 

Japan's Nippon Meat to Double Imports of Australian Beef
 

Nippon Meat Packers Inc. is projected to nearly double imports of Australian beef in its fiscal second half. This comes as Japan's ban on US beef continues boosting Australia's share of the Japanese market.

 

Japan's largest meat processor expects to import 60,000 tons of beef from Australia in the six months ending March 31, rising from 35,000 in the same period last year, said spokesman Shigeru Nakajima. Its first-half shipments of Australian beef to its processing plants in Japan also jumped from 35,000 tons to 60,000 tons.

 

"Japanese consumer demand for Australian beef, especially from grain-fed cattle, will remain high,'' Nakajima said. "More than half of the beef we buy in Australia is from grain-fed cattle.''

 

Australian beef and veal shipments to Japan, its largest export market for the meat, soared 61 percent in the first nine months of the year.

 

Japan's 10-month ban on US beef has helped Australia raise its share of the country's market from 44 percent to 91 percent, a level it wants to keep, according to Henry Palaszczuk, primary industries minister in the Australian state of Queensland.

 

Nippon Meat more than doubled net income to 10.6 billion yen ($100 million) in the year ended March.

 

US Beef Banned

 

Japan and the US agreed in October to a framework for resuming imports of US beef, banned after authorities found a case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease, in Washington state.

 

Mad Cow disease was linked to the fatal, brain-wasting condition variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease by U.K. scientists in 1996.

 

Tyson Foods Inc., the world's largest meat processor, has said Japan's approval process and the need for US exporters to verify the age of their cattle means little US beef will arrive in Japan before spring. Australia has never had a case of BSE.

 

"All we needed was a foothold in Japan and we achieved that with the US problem,'' Palaszczuk stated. "We've made the necessary inroads and we intend to maintain that market share.''

 

Nippon Meat said in September it plans to invest 3.3 billion yen to double capacity at one of its meat-packing plants in Queensland. That will boost its total output in Australia to 3,800 cattle a day by 2008.