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 confirmed. In December Kumazawa resigned.
When the government has attempted to be proactive, its efforts have worsened the situation. Last October Japan’s Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Minister Tsutomu Takebe held a “beef-eating party” meant to restore confidence. “Consumers took it as an insult,” says Karen Bairstow, a researcher who leads focus groups for the American meat industry in Tokyo. As meat sales continued to collapse, Tokyo offered to buy up and destroy beef that had been slaughtered before the MBM ban went into effect. But that plan backfired when Snow Brand Foods was caught selling the government imported meat as well as Japanese (the company has since declared bankruptcy). “The world of food labeling is full of deception,” says consumer activist Junichi Kowaka. “The Agriculture Ministry has 1,500 staffers, but they have done nothing.”
The government is not solely to blame for the erosion of trust in the beef industry. Over the last four decades Japan’s per capita beef consumption has risen tenfold to more than 10 kilograms a year, but few consumers realize that two thirds of the beef they eat is now imported. Miffed by the rampant mislabeling that was undercutting honest merchants like himself, retired butcher Koji Ushijima surveyed 2,850 stores and supermarkets on the southern island of Kyushu. His study–which is as thick as the Tokyo phone book–revealed that 54 percent of shops surveyed were selling foreign beef marked as Japanese. “The deception has continued,” he says. “Suspicious labeling is evident everywhere in Japan.”
Still, consumers will regain their faith only if they trust the regulators–who are not making things any easier on themselves. The latest revelation: since October, when Japan began checking every cow sent to slaughter for BSE, farmers have held back older animals, which are more likely to have contracted the disease. Last week the Daily Yomiuri reported that some 50,000 unproductive dairy cattle have been kept off the market, and that “some farmers are being driven to illegally dispose of old or unproductive cows.”
Such schemes are likely to forever obscure the scope of Japan’s BSE outbreak, which some experts estimate has infected as many as 50 animals. Officials have simply chosen not to believe that tally. The figure implies “Japanese cows are very seriously infected with BSE, and I don’t believe that could have happened,” says Ken Matsubara, deputy director general at Japan’s Agricultural Production Bureau. Matsubara suggests that “the international WTO structure” might have contributed to Japan’s BSE outbreak by forcing Japan to open its agricultural markets. He adds that his colleagues “are now working to assess the risk of BSE occurrence in countries which export meat to Japan.”
Foreign beef suppliers are fighting back. Last week the U.S. Meat Export Federation launched a $12 million public-awareness campaign to promote U.S. beef in Japan. In its first ad, 53-year-old Sacramento rancher Abbie Nelson outlines measures taken on her family farm to prevent BSE. Then, as a mother, she explains: “Every homemaker has the right to know what is going on the dinner table.”
Ads won’t help, however, unless the government’s credibility can be re-established. “To be honest, I don’t fully understand what mad cow is all about,” says Satoko Takahashi, 37, as she shops with her two children in a Tokyo supermarket. “But I know enough not to go near beef until everything is cleared up.” The fact that imported meat is safe doesn’t matter for one simple reason: she can’t trust the labels.
