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Bans on Japanese beef to hurt
Japanese cuisine fans
TOKYO-Six nations have banned Japanese beef following the
country's first mad cow scare, but a national beef cooperative
said Wednesday that as exports are minimal, the move will only
affect lovers of Japanese cuisine.
A slim 0.02 percent, or 69 tons, of Japanese beef was shipped
abroad in the fiscal year to March 2001, said Akira Horiguchi,
spokesman for the Agriculture and Livestock
Corp., a semigovernment body that tries to maintain national
beef prices.
"This is not going to be made into hamburger meat. This is for
restaurants that focus on Japanese cuisine," Horiguchi said.
"It's high-cost, high-quality beef for such dishes
as sukiyaki, yakiniku, or shabu shabu."Japan slaughtered some
1.278 million head of cattle last year when the average
domestic price of 100 grams of Japanese sirloin was 1,129 yen
(9.50 dollars), compared to Japanese Holstein beef at 630 yen,
Australian milk cow beef at 350 yen and American beef at 398
yen.
On Tuesday, the United States became the sixth country to ban
Japanese beef since the farm ministry announced on September
10 that brain tissue from a five-year-old Holstein dairy cow
bred in Chiba, east of Tokyo, had tested positive for mad cow
disease or bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE).If confirmed
by British BSE experts, it would be the nation's first known
case.
Mad cow disease is a brain-wasting illness which has been
linked to the fatal variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD)
in humans.Malaysia, the Philippines, South Korea, Singapore
and Taiwan have also banned Japanese beef as a result of the
discovery.
Meanwhile, Jiji press said officials from the health and
welfare ministry were meeting Wednesday to agree on adopting
European Union standards for testing one million head of
cattle every year at a cost of some three billion yen.
This comes on top of an emergency nationwide testing program
currently being conducted on all of the nation's 4.5 million
head of cattle.The ministry said testing it had conducted by
Monday had analysed 39.5 percent of the national cattle herd,
and none of the animals had been found to have symptoms of
BSE.If symptoms are found laboratory, tests would ensue, a
ministry official said.
The ministry was also tracking down the remnants of the
suspect cow's remains. The carcass had been errantly ground
into bone and meal feed and sold to a feed cooperative in
Tokushima prefecture, 500 kilometers (310 miles) west of
Tokyo.
September 21, 2001
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