Menu

Editor’s note: It took two years to convince Japan to reopen its market to American beef following a 2003 ban, which was implemented when BSE was found in a single U.S. animal. Five days after that ban was conditionally lifted, a shipment of American veal that did not meet Japan’s stipulations was discovered.

(January 20^th) we awoke to the news that a shipment of beef had arrived in Japan and that a part of that shipment had failed to meet the terms of our agreement for the resumption of trade in beef with a key-trading partner. As a result, just several weeks after resuming beef trade with Japan we are at risk at being back to where we were when I took this job about a year ago.

We know the value of this market. It's significant. Its value before 2003 was $1.4 billion. That's a lot of revenue to jeopardize over a careless mistake. No one is more disappointed than I at this turn of events, and it would be an understatement to say that I'm treating this incident very, very seriously.

While it is true that the backbone or the vertebral column which was exported to Japan is not a specified risk material under U.S. regulation – and I might add international beef trade guidelines because it was from beef under 20 months old – the fact does remain that our agreement with Japan is to export beef with no vertebral column. And very clearly this shipment in part at least failed to meet the terms of the agreement.

We believe the ineligible product was transmitted to Japan due to human error, a failure on the part of the exporter and on the part of USDA personnel to identify the product as being ineligible. The details of our export agreements are clearly and meticulously explained, and it is incumbent upon you and our inspection and verification personnel to ensure that we meet the requirements of our export agreements, all of our export agreements.

The question remains whether our actions will be enough to satisfy our friends in Japan so that we can resume beef trade with this very important trading partner. We are making the case that our swift actions address the problem because we have a comprehensive system in place to ensure the quality of our products in compliance with our export verification agreement.

But we must ensure that mistakes are not repeated. While this is not a food safety issue, this is an unacceptable failure on our part to meet the requirements of an agreement that we negotiated with Japan. Ensuring compliance with all trade agreements will require diligence and absolute attention to detail on your part and on the part of our personnel.

Billions of dollars of trade literally hang in the balance on these issues.