020204 Mad Cow Disease Costs Japan Over $1.5 Billion

Tokyo - Japan's outbreak of mad cow disease has cost the country's farmers and food industry more than 200 billion yen ($1.5 billion) since the first confirmed case in September, a government minister said.

Agriculture Minister Tsutomu Takebe told Parliament that Korean barbecue restaurants, one of the worst affected sectors, had estimated losses of 54-64 billion yen between September and December.

The Nihon Keizai Shimbun newspaper said in its Thursday evening edition that farmers suffered 63.3 billion yen in losses between September and December, while butchers' shops reported 90.7 billion yen in lost sales from September-January.

However, farmers have received 46.6 billion yen in government subsidies, reducing their real losses, the daily said.

Japan confirmed its first case of the brain-wasting disease, formally known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in September. Since then two other dairy cows have tested positive.

As a result, consumers have shunned beef, particularly home-bred beef, ignoring government assurances it was safe.

The Agriculture Ministry has decided to use public funds to buy old cattle which farmers cannot sell on the market because of consumer fears over mad cow disease, officials said.

The ministry plans to spend 20 billion yen on this programme, targeting a total of 370,000 old cattle--300,000 dairy cows and 70,000 beef cattle, the officials said.

“An announcement will be made later, but the programme will be for a one-year period from February 1,” a ministry official said. Associations of livestock farmers and dairy farmers nationwide will purchase the cattle, but the government will shoulder the cost, he said.

British scientists discovered BSE in 1986 and linked the disease a decade later to variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD), a fatal brain affliction in humans.

In Europe, vCJD has killed about 100 people, almost all of them in the UK. There have been no reports of anyone who has died or fallen sick in Japan since the nation's first case of mad cow disease--and the first outside Europe--was reported on a farm in Chiba, near Tokyo.

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