Japan wants to review a report by U.S. officials on their re-audit of American beef plants before the two sides meet to discuss beef trade, suspended for nearly four months over mad cow disease fears, a Japanese official said on Thursday.
U.S. Agriculture Undersecretary J.B. Penn said on Wednesday that two high-level U.S. Agriculture Department officials would travel to Japan next week to discuss progress toward resuming beef trade.
Mamoru Ishihara, vice minister of Japan's Agriculture Ministry, said the ministry was preparing an expert-level meeting with the USDA, although the date had not yet been fixed.
"To make our meeting fruitful, we want to be informed about the contents of the U.S. report beforehand," he told reporters.
Penn said Acting Undersecretary Chuck Lambert and Ellen Terpstra, deputy undersecretary for Farm and Foreign Agricultural Services, would travel to Tokyo to report on USDA's re-audit of packing plants eligible for beef exports to Japan.
USDA promised to take the action at the previous round of expert-level talks in Tokyo in March, where Japan said doubts over confidence in the U.S. export system must be dispelled before imports could resume.
Japan suspended U.S. beef imports on January 20, just a month after it partially lifted a two-year-old ban on U.S. beef imposed over mad cow disease fears, when Japanese inspectors discovered banned spinal material in a veal shipment from New York.
Japan in December had lifted a ban on U.S. beef on condition that the meat came from animals no older than 20 months and that specified risk materials that could spread mad cow disease, such as spinal cords, were removed before shipment.
Beef has become a thorny issue in relations between Japan and its closest ally. Before the initial ban, Japan was the top importer of U.S. beef, buying 240,000 tonnes valued at $1.4 billion in 2003. |
