Fallout from BSE 'positive' positively dripping with irony
June 17, 2005
Meatingplace.com
Dan Murphy
http://www.meatingplace.com/
Nobody in the U.S. meat industry is numb to the impact of a potentially positive case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, such as the one the Agriculture Department announced last week. As news spread that USDA was sending animal tissue it initially deemed BSE-negative to the World Reference Laboratory in Weybridge, England, for further testing, more than a few industry officials expressed concern that this development might further scuttle the never-ending initiative to restore U.S. beef exports with key trading partners worldwide.

 

There is irony, however, in the reality that the BSE-positive confirmation that consumed both meatpackers and the media in 2003 now barely registers on the industry's emotional Richter scale.
From agony to ennui in less than two years. It's one of the most notable — though little discussed — aspects of the whole BSE mess that has so inappropriately impacted the industry: Despite how minimal an animal health threat BSE is, and always has been, it has impacted the industry's financial health to a degree that is virtually unprecedented.

 

That's just one among several ironies, including:
Irony No. 1: The country that started the carousel of action-reaction trading bans on North American beef is actually turning BSE-positives into a positive for its domestic beef industry.

 

Canada, home of both of the BSE cases confirmed on this continent, is using the U.S. border closure to its advantage. With a Canadian Agri-Food investment of more than $50 million (CN), Canadian cattle producers are ramping up production, even as the country's slaughter capacity is expected to double in 2005.

 

Worse, at least for the U.S. industry, Canadian agriculture officials have discussed a total ban on feeding bovine proteins to livestock, along with possibly offering universal BSE testing for any export customer who so desires it, measures that are contrary to the "sound science" both industry and government on this side of the border have adopted as gospel.

 

Absent a relatively rapid restoration of trade between Canada and the United States, and among U.S. beef trading partners elsewhere, the crisis that once threatened to cripple Canadian cattle production may one day turn out to have been the catalyst for development of a formidable competitor.

 

Irony No. 2:Activists who profit from any sort of adversity continue to command a profile years after BSE came and went as a media focus.
Since the first Canadian BSE case surfaced in May 2003, U.S. packers have processed more than 70 million head of cattle, or 50 billion pounds of beef, with only one — now maybe two — confirmed cases of a BSE-positive animal. Yet blowhards like John Stauber, the PR Watch mouthpiece, continue to garner attention and air time with their phony, deception-driven screed.

 

At least Stauber has been reduced to appearances on Air America radio, as opposed to his December 2003 high water mark, when he was on hold with CNN producers even as then-USDA Secretary Ann Veneman was announcing the nation's first confirmed BSE positive.

 

In his 15 minutes of shame yesterday, Stauber repeated enough distortions and outright lies to fill up an entire chapter of a book. You'd be hard pressed to disassemble, as our president says, the fabric of falsehoods he and a whole raft of BSE critics attempt to piece together every time mad cow news forces the media to briefly turns its ADD-esque focus on some momentary beef industry bashing.
He first invoked the specter of a government conspiracy, which is the left jab that sets up the power punch of "corporate greed," the one-two, go-to game plan for any modern activist even a couple weeks into the job — much less a self-styled career crusader like Stauber.

 

"It's the fault of the Bush administration," he proclaimed to "Morning Sedition" show hosts. "They could have taken steps to stop mad cow, but they succumbed to pressure from Big Beef and allowed them to keep feeding slaughterhouse waste to cattle, which is why we have this epidemic in the first place."

 

Epidemic? Even the most liberal definition of the term hardly fits the handful of cases that every single scientific observer of the global outbreak of BSE predicted would likely occur in North America as the beef herd's seven-year window of exposure to prion-infected feed slowly closed. Yet Mr. "Mad Cow USA," the title of the nearly 10-year old book he keeps trying to hustle, would have consumers believe that they're only a burger or two away from a certain and utterly horrific death from variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

 

Which Stauber is only too happy to deliberately confuse with classic CJD, a long-established yet extremely rare brain disease that has no connection with BSE.
It's absurd, but the persistence of the arguments Stauber et al continue to sell the media should remind producers and packers that even though the majority of their customers don't seem to care, the positive PR efforts launched in 2004 need to continue unabated.

 

Irony No. 3: The very success the beef industry has had in "managing" federal regulatory oversight may prove to be its Achilles heel.
That's because beef producers for years either openly opposed or covertly delayed development of universal animal ID. Despite the obvious advantages such a system would bring to both public and private sectors — and not just for BSE, but for more serious threats, such as foot-and-mouth disease — the industry made sure animal ID took up long-term residence on the back burner.

 

Now the lack of such a system is being used as a trade barrier to keep U.S. beef out of key markets that represent the majority of the industry's future growth potential. How many producers now wish they could go back 10 years and vote "yes" on implementation of animal ID?

 

But the ultimate irony of BSE in North America would be industry's failure to respond proactively to all three of the above scenarios. Unless beef producers, packers and processors start worrying a little less about echoing a "beef is safe" message to consumers who really require no further convincing and a lot more about making the changes that need to be made to the system, a fourth item might one day be added to the list of ironies:

 

The country with the safest beef in the world ends up being perceived as the one with the riskiest exports.
Dan Murphy is a freelance writer and former editor of MMT magazine based in the Pacific Northwest . His column, THE VOCAL POINT, appears in this space each Friday.