FEATURE - Mad cow a life-or-death issue for Japan farmers
Date: 20-Sep-01
Country: JAPAN
Author: Aya Takada
Now he's afraid that a single dairy cow some 50 km (30 miles) away from his four farms in Chiba prefecture, bordering Tokyo, could have shattered his livelihood.
"The discovery of only one suspected case of mad cow disease has caused an over-reaction," he said.
"What will happen if a second and third case is reported?" said the 65-year-old Umehara, who worries he'll be wiped out if beef and dairy product sales fall sharply.
"This is a matter of life and death to us farmers," he said, sitting in the office of the local farmers' co-operative.
After the discovery of Asia's first suspected case of mad cow disease was made public earlier this month, food retailers in Tokyo, in an attempt to ease consumers' concern, rushed to put up signs saying they did not sell beef or milk produced in Chiba.
Scientists say humans are unlikely to catch brain-wasting mad cow disease - formally known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) - by consuming meat and milk from a diseased cow, because the products would not be culled from infected parts of the animal.
However, more than 100 people in Europe are thought to have died from the human version of BSE, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, most of them in Britain.
That is why the 2,000 or so cattle farmers in Chiba, Japan's second largest producer of farm products by region, are concerned their products will be shunned, as happened in Europe, despite a clean bill of health.
Umehara said he checked all 200 of his Holstein dairy cows and 3,000 beef cattle, a Holstein-hybrid, for the disease.
All were fine, he said.
Umehara is pinning his hopes on further tests in Britain on the remains of the slaughtered dairy cow, ordered by the government, to alleviate the fears of retailers and consumers.
"I was terribly shocked by the news. I still hope the suspected case will eventually turn out to be negative," he said.
TAINTED FEED
The source of the disease in Japan, which has 4.5 million cows, has not been identified. But experts say it may have come from imports of tainted feed from Britain, where the disease first broke out in the late 1980s.
Mad cow disease is caused when cattle eat infected meat-bone meal, or crushed animal carcasses.
Japan's Health Ministry said yesterday it plans to adopt methods used in Europe to test about one million cows in Japan for the disease, starting next month, Kyodo news agency reported.
Umehara, who started livestock farming in 1964, said most farmers do not know if they have ever fed meat-bone meal to their cattle because they buy compound feed.
Japanese feed makers had added a small amount of meat-bone meal to compound feed for cattle until the Agriculture Ministry told them to stop in 1996, following a British ban on the use of meat-bone meal for feed.
The ministry estimates that in the year to March 1996, Japanese feed makers used 443,782 tonnes of meat-bone meal - 247 tonnes for cattle, 92,382 tonnes for pigs, and 350,323 tonnes for poultry.
"Feed makers used meat-bone meal because it was cheaper than other sources of protein. And the government allowed them to use it until 1996, although mad cow disease was spreading in Britain since the late 1980s," said Umehara.
"The use of meat-bone meal for feed was not requested by farmers."
Some 90 percent of feed ingredients in Japan are imported, according to ministry estimates, making safety difficult for Japanese farmers to police.
The National Confederation of Farmers Movements, which groups 40,000 Japanese farmers, has urged the government to immediately ban imports of meat-bone meal from any country and prohibit its use in any animal feed.
The ministry allows meat-bone meal to be imported from countries other than the European Union.
It also allows it to be used for pig and poultry feed.
"As long as feed makers use meat-bone meal for pig and poultry feed, there remains the risk that meat-bone meal is accidentally mixed with cattle feed," said Mas