020753 USDA Secretary Plugs American Beef Ahead Summit

Tokyo - U.S. Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman cooked beef and zucchini with Japanese schoolchildren to boost the image of American meat amid widespread fear of mad cow disease here.

In Japan for a farming summit of five leading agriculture regions, including the European Union and Canada, Veneman stressed to children in aprons reading "American Beef. High Quality" that U.S. beef has not been tainted by the disease.

"Look at all this good food," she said before asking for a pair of chopsticks and digging into a bowl of marinated U.S. beef to make meat and vegetable wraps in aluminum foil.

American beef, a mainstay of U.S. food exports to Japan, has been hard hit by last autumn's Japanese outbreak of mad cow disease. U.S. beef accounted for 31% of the Japanese market in 2001, but has seen its exports fall nearly 40% this year.

Veneman later bought a spicy beef boxed lunch with California-grown rice before boarding a bullet train to the western city of Nara for the Quint Agricultural Ministerial Summit, where she meets her counterparts from Japan, Australia, Canada and the European Union.

The two-day conference is partially aimed at establishing priorities for the current round of World Trade Organization negotiations.

Agriculture is one of the most contentious issues to be tackled over the next three years in the WTO negotiations, which were launched in November.

The United States has come under attack from the European Union and Japan for major farm subsidies signed into law by U.S. President George W. Bush in May.

In response, the U.S. side plans to lobby in Nara for a new proposal to reduce trade barriers across-the- board, a high ranking U.S. delegation official said on condition of anonymity. Details were to be released later in Washington, the official said.

"We have taken a lot of criticism over our farm bill," the official said. "We've got a bold new proposal on the table and we would like the other countries to now react to that."

The WTO's 144 member countries have agreed to reduce all forms of export subsidies and to make major cuts in domestic subsidies.

Also in Tokyo, EU Agriculture Commissioner Franz Fischler said the "U.S. is going the wrong way," while Japanese Agriculture Ministry official Shiroshi Takahashi said the U.S. subsidies backslide on WTO ambitions.

"We want to see to what extent the United States will reduce their domestic support," Takahashi said.

The United States is frequently at odds with the other nations attending this week's conference over such issues as subsidies, tariffs, environmental issues and genetically modified foods.

The United States also favors across-the-board cuts in all agriculture tariffs to open foreign markets to U.S. farmers, while Japan prefers a more flexible approach allowing countries to decide for themselves what products to tax.

Source: Associated Press

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