America’s meatpacking industry has lost thousands of jobs while Canada’s is growing because of the U.S. ban on Canadian cattle imports, Canadian Ambassador Frank McKenna said Wednesday.
U.S. beef processors, including two big plants in Colorado, have lost jobs while Canada’s industry has grown 30 percent in the past year, McKenna said.
“Your processing industry has been hit hard,” he said in a meeting with editors and writers of The Denver Post. “You’ll end up losing probably tens of thousands of jobs.”
The Canadian and U.S. governments favor reopening the border, although a proposal to do so has been halted after a legal challenge by a U.S. cattle producers group.
The U.S. banned Canadian cattle imports in May 2003 after the first case of mad cow disease was discovered in Alberta, Canada. Two more cases have been found in Canada since. The U.S. meat-processing industry has lost 6,100 of its 153,000 jobs since the ban, according to Janet Riley of the Washington-based American Meat Institute.
The closure left U.S. meatpackers with a shortage of cattle to process and depressed cattle and beef prices in Canada because of a surplus.
“It’s a huge issue,” Riley said. “We’re seeing (U.S.) plants operating at reduced capacity or shut down entirely, while Canada’s industry is growing. For a long time, we worked together; now, Canada has become one of our biggest competitors.”
Swift & Co. laid off 800 workers in December at its Greeley beef-processing plant. The Cargill plant in Fort Morgan, formerly operated by Excel Corp., cut 150 jobs in January 2004.
Swift has attributed the layoffs in part to Japan’s ban on U.S. cattle in 2003 after this country’s lone case of mad cow disease was found in Washington state in a cow born in Alberta.
As for the U.S. ban on Canadian cattle, it perpetuates an “unfair advantage for Canadian beef processors,” Swift spokesman Jim Herlihy said. “The (meatpacking) jobs created in Canada likely will never return to the U.S.”
Mad cow disease, formally known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE, eats holes in the brains of cattle. Food contaminated with the disease can afflict humans with variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, which is fatal.
None of the infected North American cows has entered the human-food or animal-feed systems, U.S. and Canadian officials have said.
Staff writer Steve Raabe can be reached at 303-820-1948 or sraabe@denverpost.com.
