U.S. Beef Exports to Japan May Resume Soon

By LIBBY QUAID

WASHINGTON – Japanese inspectors will be visiting U.S. meat processing plants in the coming days to certify them now that the country’s 2-year-old import ban on American beef has been lifted, Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns said.

American beef could arrive in Japan within the next week to 10 days, Johanns said in a telephone interview Sunday evening with The Associated Press.

"I think we’ll see plants that are given the green light yet this week," Johanns said from Hong Kong, where he is participating in global trade talks. "Once that happens, it’s just a matter of satisfying them that we’ve met their requirements. I think beef will be moving to Japan literally in the next week to 10 days."

In response to Japan’s easing its ban on American beef, the United States will resume imports of Japanese beef, Johanns said Monday.

"We are ready for that market to open," Johanns said during a press conference in Hong Kong at the World Trade Organization meeting.

Once the most lucrative market for U.S. beef, Japanese customers purchased $1.4 billion of the product in 2003. But Japan banned American beef after mad cow disease was discovered in the U.S. in December 2003.

Likewise, the U.S. has had a ban on beef from Japan, which has found 21 cases of mad cow disease.

The Agriculture Department has been working since August on a rule that would lift the ban, which the U.S. imposes on countries with cases of mad cow disease. It lifted a ban on Canadian beef earlier this year.

Mad cow disease is the common name for bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE, a degenerative nerve disease. In people, eating contaminated meat products is linked to a rare but fatal disease called variant Creutzfeldt Jakob disease. More than 150 people have died of the disease, most of them in the United Kingdom, where there was an outbreak in the 1980s and 1990s.

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