When's the last time you heard about mad cow disease? Right! So Japan has further eased its decade-old restriction on imports of American beef, but it may be too late to do the US cattle industry much good.
A Japanese government council that oversees food and drug safety cleared a change, effective Feb. 1, in import regulations that would permit imports of meat from American cattle 30 months old or younger, rather than the current 20 months.
Japan, the world's largest net importer of food, instituted the ban in 2003, after mad cow disease was found in a single cow in Washington State. Humans are thought to catch the disease's fatal human variant, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, by eating meat, including the brain and spinal cord, from contaminated carcasses.
Japan eased the ban in 2006 but only for meat from cattle 20 months or younger. Japanese officials argued that the incidence of the disease was higher in older animals.
Even with this week's further relaxation, however, beef industry experts said beef producers faced many more challenges to reverse a prolonged slump that has pared the nations herd to its lowest level in 60 years and sent prices soaring.
And while Japan has opened the door for increased imports, Russia is threatening again to close it. A Russian food safety watchdog may restrict imports of US and Canadian frozen beef and pork products from Feb. 11 and frozen products by Feb. 11 if exporters do not certify them free of the feed additive ractopamine. Alexey
Alexeyenko, spokesman for Russia's Veterinary and Phyto-Sanitary Surveillance Service, said the VPSS had warned regulators in both countries of tougher measures on ractopamine.
Aside from the reduction in exports, ranchers have been grappling over the last half-dozen years or so with rising feed prices as ethanol producers drove up the price of corn, and with drought that has parched grazing land and deprived their animals of water. The recession and changing consumer tastes contributed to the woes.
While the industry has had boom and bust cycles lasting on average four to five years, the current decline is firmly entrenched.
"Previous cycles of production and prices going back 100 years related to the particular workings of the beef industry and were usually self-correcting," said Derrell Peel, professor of agricultural economics at Oklahoma State University. "But the current cycle is largely due to external factors and that is really why we are at this historic low."
Cameron Bruett, spokesman for one of the largest beef processors, JBS, welcomed Japan's action, saying it would help increase business certainty and reduce complexity for the companys beef production, which operates in Brazil, Argentina, Canada and the United States. "While the declining herd remains a challenge for
the industry, any time you increase access to additional consumers, that benefits the whole supply chain," Bruett said.
