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Shutting the door on beef once again
Let's play a game of "what would you do?" Let's say you are CEO of a small company and had been selling me pink yachts with blue polka dots at a very lucrative income for five years. Let's say two years ago I discovered that one of the polka dots was painted with lead-based paint and I refused any additional yachts from your company because I felt it was a health threat to my family. We negotiated for two years and finally I agreed to purchase yachts from your company again.
As the CEO of the company what steps would you take to insure that I was 100 percent satisfied with the first yacht you sent me? Would you personally study all the minor requirements, check to make sure the paint contained no lead, and do a last-minute inspection before shipment to me? If you realized future shipments rested on my complete satisfaction with this first shipment, you certainly would lean over backwards to make sure it met all my requirements.
So, what happened at Atlantic Veal & Lamb as they prepared their first beef shipment to Japan since their two-year ban on beef imports was lifted? The Brooklyn, New York meat processor said Friday it included veal backbone material in a beef shipment to Japan because of a "misinterpretation" of export requirements." The company's president, Philip Peerless, called the incident "an honest mistake."
EXCUSE ME! There is no room for misinterpretations and honest mistakes in a delicate situation like this that affects everyone in the beef industry.
If you haven't kept up on this situation, vertebrae parts, among the tissue types Japan has banned as a condition of reopening its markets to U.S. beef, were discovered at Tokyo's Narita International Airport on Friday in an 860-pound product shipment from New York. Japan immediately reimposed its ban on U.S. beef. This discovery undermines assurances made to Japan by the USDA and the U.S. Meat Export Federation that the U.S. can guarantee a safe product meeting Japanese standards.
This shipments follows announcement in November that the USDA, on a case being litigated for over two years, ruled, for the third time it is unlawful for a supervisor to instruct a veterinarian to sign an export certificate if the certificate does not completely meet the requirements of the destination country. This is the third time the FSIS has been officially overruled when it has attempted to coerce veterinarians to sign export certificates that were deemed to be inaccurate or incomplete. It doesn't sound honest to me but probably meets Washington D.C. standards.
Now, the Japanese will be doing an extensive investigation into U.S. safety measures and inspection procedures. It will be interesting to see what they find.
As part of its response to the incident, the USDA will be retraining and adding U.S. inspectors of beef exports to assure that they comply with importing countries' standards. Once more the USDA has shut the door after the horse is out of the barn.