PLUNGING beef sales. Restaurants and farmers facing bankruptcy. Government
bungling and inaction. For those who missed it first time round, an outbreak of
BSE in Japan is beginning to look like a repeat performance of Britain’s famous
nightmare.
Since Japan’s first case was reported last month, no others have surfaced.
But experts think the crisis is far from over. At least 300 tonnes of
potentially contaminated meat and bonemeal (MBM) was imported from Britain
before the government banned this in 1996.
Earlier this year the European Commission named Japan as a high-risk country
in a report about the worldwide potential for BSE infection. But the Japanese
government refused to publish a Japanese-language version.
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“There is objectively a risk,” a spokesman for the EC’s Tokyo office told
reporters in June. “So one would expect their authorities not to close their
eyes and to deal with it.”
Just two months later the first case of BSE was diagnosed. Senior Ministry of
Agriculture official Takemi Nagemura told reporters that the carcass of the
infected animal had been “disposed of”. Only later did he admit that it had in
fact been processed into MBM, which would have been fed to yet more cows.
“When I said the carcass had been disposed of, I meant that it was not
intended for human consumption,” Nagemura explained at a press conference a few
days later. “We never intended to conceal anything.”
Ministry officials further astonished reporters by saying they hadn’t known
it was illegal to process carcasses of cows with suspected BSE, even though
they’d issued guidelines telling farmers to feed MBM only to chickens, pigs and
other livestock—but not cows.
The government has belatedly moved to contain the crisis by banning foods
containing certain cow parts, and burning all stocks of MBM. “The government
tried to protect the farming industry by covering up the potential dangers,”
says Kyosen Ohashi, an opposition member of the upper house of Parliament. “But
the plan has backfired.” Now where have we heard that before?
