U.S. beef producers, including those in Colorado, have a multibillion-dollar stake in the renewed effort to assure Japanese and other foreign consumers that we can meet their exacting standards for importing U.S. meat.
It’s true, as Sen. Ken Salazar, D-Colo., argues, that American beef is the safest in the world. Just two U.S. animals, one of them imported from Canada, have ever been diagnosed with “mad cow disease.” Nobody has ever contracted the rare and fatal human nerve disorder Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease from eating American beef.
Despite that excellent safety record, more than 60 nations banned U.S. beef after a case of mad-cow disease was found in Washington state in 2003. That threatened $3.8 billion in annual exports, half of which went to Japan. The Japanese ban was finally lifted last month after the U.S. agreed to ship beef from cattle no older than 20 months and only after removing spinal cord, brains and other parts blamed for spreading mad-cow disease. Yet, just a few weeks later, Japanese inspectors found material from spine bones in three of 41 boxes of veal shipped by Atlantic Veal & Lamb Inc. The meat itself was not contaminated with mad-cow disease and came from calves less than 6 months old. Mad cow disease has never been found in animals that young.
But the rule that “the customer is always right” is never more important than when real or perceived health risks are involved. No matter how safe the beef was, it didn’t meet the sales agreement or the customer’s standards – allowing it to be shipped to Japan was a ghastly blunder.
Salazar is urging the U.S.D.A. to redouble its efforts to assure our beer supply is safe and he noted with approval that the agency moved swiftly to remedy the problem by banning the offending company from further exports and “sending a team to Japan and requiring additional export protocols in this country, including unannounced inspections of export facilities and additional training to all officials involved in the export of U.S. beef.”
In contrast to Salazar’s focus on safety, Rep. Marilyn Musgrave reacted to the Japanese action by immediately threatening trade sanctions in an effort to force U.S. beef back into Japan’s market.
Memo to Rep. Musgrave: While the British are fond of a variety of canned beef known as bully beef, bullying customers, here or abroad, is a sure route to disaster.
We applaud USDA’s goal of doing whatever it takes to prove U.S. products are safe. Trying to force-feed our beef into wary Japanese under threat of trade sanctions would stigmatize U.S. exports for decades.
