041109 Good News for Colorado Beef

Denver, CO - Colorado cattle producers are kicking up their boot heels over the prospect of resumed U.S. beef exports to Japan, closed to American beef since a mad- cow disease late last year.

The Japanese ban had cost Colorado cattle ranchers, already badly hit by drought, about 9% on the value of their calves.

There are no statistics on how much of the $2.9 billion annual Colorado beef sales went to Japan before the ban took effect in January. But Japan was the single largest foreign buyer of U.S. beef exports, accounting for about $1.2 billion, or more than one- third of total U.S. exports of $3.2 billion in 2003, according to Terry Fankhauser, executive vice president of the Colorado Cattlemen's Association.

Japan banned imports of U.S. beef after bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE, was discovered in a cow imported from Canada into Washington state last December. Until then, BSE, or mad cow disease, hadn't been found in American cattle. BSE is linked to a rare but fatal human form called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

A BSE outbreak in the United Kingdom decimated herds there in the late 1980s, with more than 3.7 million head of cattle being destroyed. The disease, which showed up in Canada in 1993 in a cow imported from Britain, was linked to cattle that had been fed meat-and-bone meal, which has been banned from use in the U.S. since 1997.

Japan backed off a demand that all U.S. cattle be tested for the disease when a Japanese food safety panel ruled that tests could be eliminated for cattle younger than 20 months. U.S. officials balked at the requirement that all cattle be tested, citing expense and claiming that the tests are reliable only on animals more than 30 months old.

"Our country has worked very hard to put techniques into place to assure safety to the American consumer," Fankhauser said, "and that's being recognized by this move in Japan."

Additionally, Taiwan, which bought about $325 million worth of American beef in 2003, has agreed in principle to reopen its markets.

Fankhauser said that resumption of beef exports to Japan will take some time. "By 2005, we expect to see some exports take place," he said.

There are some doubts about the plan, though. Meatpackers say that Japan is asking for stricter age-verification procedures than most American packers use, requiring cattle ages to be confirmed by production records such as birth or insemination dates.

Fankhauser doesn't see that as an impediment. "The program being implemented is similar to the beef export verification program," he said. "It's not really anything new, just an extension of that program."

There's no question the U.S. beef industry will have to work hard to win back its market share. Its biggest competitor in Asia is Australia, which hasn't had any BSE cases.

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