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US Beef and Japan

US beef suppliers continue to have trouble meeting the conditions for export to the Japanese market, and in response to the possibility that a recent shipment of ox tongue might have come from a cow over the age of twenty months, Cargill’s Dodge City, Kansas plant has been added to the growing list of beef processing facilities that are no longer allowed to ship to Japan. That list also includes a Jobbers Meat Packing Company plant in Los Angeles and Tyson’s plant in Lexington, Nebraska.

To this observer, the current arrangement seems to benefit the Japanese side of the argument quite nicely. Due to erroneous shipments and a lack of proper documentation - incidents that are now occurring on a monthly basis - it is becoming easier and easier for the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries and the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare to make the argument that US beef suppliers simply do not care about the Japanese public. It is now easy to say that US suppliers are sloppy, cannot follow procedure, make too many mistakes, and thus: Could you really trust them enough to eat their beef?

For their part, the US side continues to send ‘high level’ delegations to Japan in an effort to convince officials here to ease the restrictions on US beef. Last Friday, yet another US delegation failed to make its case to the relevant ministries here in Japan.

The Japan Times tells us that:

The Japanese delegation reiterated that the U.S. should accept additional Japanese inspections of meatpacking factories there to verify compliance with rules for shipping beef to Japan under an earlier bilateral agreement.

It also called on the U.S. side to report to Japan on a meatpacking plant’s shipment that contained meat possibly violating the bilaterally agreed terms.

Thus, what we see is the Japanese side not offering any loosening of restrictions here. Instead, their position appears to be one of, “Convince us not to make these restrictions stricter.” What is gradually happening is that as US meat packers make more and more mistakes in their export shipments, it becomes more and more difficult to dismiss the Japanese side as ‘protectionism’ (even though it most likely is).

The US side does not seem to understand that it is not in the driver’s seat on this issue. It first needs to win the trust of its customer (which, until 2003, was the largest export consumer of US beef) by following the meticulous attention to detail that Japan requires. If that cannot be done, and cannot be done for a sustained period of time, trust will never be regained, and these meetings will continue to go on in vain.

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