Good Enough to Eat?(Brief Article)

Ranchers know they're in trouble when their sales pitch amounts to: "Our beef won't kill you." Yet that's the message dozens of foreign meat merchants brought to the annual FOODEX trade show in Tokyo last week. SAFE. NATURAL. HEALTHY. GRASS-FED, claimed a New Zealand Meat Board brochure. Likewise, the U.S. beef lobby distributed a booklet on America's vigilance against the brain-wasting disorder bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE, which surfaced in Japan last year. Amid such grim food for thought, Mexican meatpacker Su Karne served up the real thing: sizzling tenderloin. "One lady took a bite and gushed: 'It's been so long since I've had beef. This tastes glorious!'" said the man at the hot plate, adding: "As a selling point we emphasize we're not from Japan."

It will take more than a foreign label to revive Asia's biggest beef market. Since last September, when Japan reported its first case of mad-cow disease (which in its human form has claimed more than 100 lives in Europe), beef consumption has shrunk by more than a third--a dip that could cost foreign suppliers $2 billion this year. (That's especially bad news for American ranchers, who send almost half of their beef exports to Japan.) The problem has been compounded by the revelation that more than half of the country's butcher shops may be mislabeling their cheap imported meat as Japanese in order to jack up the price. Millions of Japanese consumers are now wondering what kind of beef they're buying, and if any of it is safe. "Maybe we'll end up vegetarian," says Michiyo Fujiwara, a Tokyo housewife.

Unfortunately, as with several other recent crises in Japan, the people entrusted with fixing the problem are the problem. Japan's bureaucrats were once honored as modern-day samurai. Now this army of paper pushers, inspectors, regulators and policy wonks has frittered away public confidence through a string of preventable tragedies. In the 1980s the Health Ministry failed to prevent HIV-tainted blood products from being prescribed to hundreds of hemophiliacs. After the 1995 Kobe earthquake, Japan's poor civil-defense preparedness cost hundreds-- possibly thousands--of lives. Last year's mad-cow outbreak fits the familiar pattern: the government ignored obvious risks, failed to prepare for them and then tried to cover up its incompetence--leading to yet another loss of face. "What's been going on since the bubble burst in Japan [in 1990] is an erosion in the credibility of central authorities," says Philip Seng, president of the U.S. Meat Export Federation in Colorado. "This is not an issue of beef per se. It's an issue of trust."

Japan's BSE scare has unfolded as a series of official missteps. The disease, which first appeared in Britain in 1986, infects animals exposed to feed fortified with slaughterhouse waste called meat and bone meal (MBM). Unlike European governments, which banned the feed outright in the 1990s, Japan merely advised ranchers against using it. Thanks to spotty compliance, MBM remained in Japan's food cycle. Despite warnings from the European Union, officials continued to insist the beef supply was safe. "Japan has an extremely high safety level," Agriculture Vice Minister Hideaki Kumazawa declared last June. Three months later a Holstein dairy cow in Chiba Prefecture tested positive for BSE.

The timing of that discovery--which was first publicized on September 11--allowed officials to downplay the outbreak. Initially they claimed the animal in question had been destroyed, when in fact it had been processed into feed and sent back into the food chain. That disclosure prompted Japan to ban MBM feed outright. Two additional cases of BSE have since been ...