December 27, 2012
Brazil will give countries that restricted imports of its beef, after a case of mad cow disease, until March to drop the measures or it will file a complaint at the World Trade Organisation (WTO).
According to farm ministry officials, five countries have implemented full or partial bans on Brazilian beef imports since confirmation this month of a case of atypical bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), or mad cow disease, in a cow that died in 2010.
Atypical BSE cases can occur spontaneously in elderly cattle and the 13-year-old animal in the Brazilian case never developed full-blown BSE, testing instead positive for a protein that is the causal agent of mad cow disease.
"March is the deadline," said Enio Marques Pereira, Secretary for Animal and Plant Health at Brazil's farm ministry, after a meeting at the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) headquarters Friday (Dec 21).
Officials stressed Brazil has kept its status as a country presenting negligible BSE risk under an OIE classification, and that OIE norms consider safe for consumption products like red meat and gelatine, even when BSE has been declared in a country.
The Brazilian cow in question never entered the food chain. Countries that suspended Brazilian beef imports include Egypt and Saudi Arabia which rank among Brazil's top 10 beef buyers, but Marques said the economic impact so far was "very low", noting that Egypt was only banning meat from the region where the BSE case occurred. The other countries which have imposed temporary bans are South Africa, Japan and China.
The OIE welcomed the fact that Brazil had managed to detect the atypical case in a national herd of more than 200 million, though logistical problems at a laboratory delayed the analysis of the animal's tissue since its death in 2010.
Bernard Vallat, director general of the OIE, said that an end to the use of cattle feed containing matter from ruminant animals had succeeded in nearly eradicating BSE after tens of thousands of cases in the 1980s and 1990s, mostly in Britain.
Brazilian beef exports declined 14% in 2011, to 820.239 tonnes, establishing it as the world's third largest beef exporter behind Australia and the US, according to Global Trade Atlas.
Middle East countries have become the main client for Brazil's beef. The Middle East was the largest region for Brazilian beef shipments in 2011, with Iran (130.649 tonnes), Egypt (96.937 tonnes), Saudi Arabia (27.951 tonnes) and Israel (15.937 tonnes) all taking substantial volumes.
