Beef Trade Talks Clouded by New BSE Controversy; (May 8, 2004) By Daniel Yovich for meatingplace.com: Agriculture Department officials are slated to begin a new round of discussions next week in Tokyo with their Japanese counterparts, but the recent controversy over USDA's failure to test a suspect Texas cow for bovine spongiform encephalopathy may complicate the talks.

Industry and government insiders say privately they expect no deal will be finalized that will allow U.S. beef to again be imported into Japan until after that country's elections in July. The talks slated for late next week are being the first in a series of negotiations arranged last month by USDA Undersecretary for Farm and Foreign Agriculture Services J.B. Penn, and will involve discussion of mainly technical issues.

Also likely to be discussed is the breakdown in BSE testing protocol last month by USDA. The New York Times reported on Thursday that the Consumers Union, the Center for Food Safety and the Government Accountability Project will ask Congress to look into why the cow was not tested and the possibility that federal officials ordered that no test be done. The Times reported the consumer groups reached their decision after reading a news story published Wednesday by Meatingplace.com that outlined how USDA technicians and veterinarians at the San Angelo, Texas, plant were ordered by a USDA supervisor at the agency's regional headquarters in Austin not to test the animal.

The Japanese media has extensively covered this development, said U.S. Meat Export Federation spokesman Lynn Heinze, and he said while he expects Japanese consumers to interpret the development differently than Japanese officials, the issue will likely still color next week's talks.

"This has gotten a lot of attention in the Japanese media," Heinze said. "My take on it is that the Japanese government will not see this as a very big issue. They understand that the food never entered the food chain."

USDA spokesman Ed Loyd said the agency was conducting an internal investigation of what went wrong and why, and said that "it might be premature" to definitively say USDA's Austin office overruled the agency's staff on the ground at the San Angelo plant. The Reuters news service reported that USDA might have the results of the investigation as soon as today.

If Congress does heed the consumer groups' call for an investigation, that would mark the third time this year the agency has become embroiled in high-profile probes of its testing protocols.

USDA Inspector General Phyllis Fong is conducting what could become a criminal investigation into allegations that documents were falsified in declaring a BSE-positive Holstein cow found in Washington state in December was a downer.

The House Government Reform Committee is conducting a separate investigation into the allegations that USDA officials conspired to falsify documents involving the Washington state cow. The Republican and Democratic leaders of the committee have accused USDA of misleading the public about what they say is a key point in the nation's first BSE discovery — that the cow was a downer.