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(回答先: 牛肉問題 相反する米議会 ─ （産経新聞）よくまとめてくれました 投稿者 天木ファン 日時 2005 年 3 月 04 日 16:46:50)
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/04/business/worldbusiness/04beef.html?hp&ex=1109998800&en=7c1ec078d8475b6a&ei=5094&partner=homepage
Strain Lingers for Canadians on Cattle Ban
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2005/03/04/business/beef.span.jpg
Jeff Bassett/Canadian Press for The New York Times
In British Columbia, Bill Freding has been reluctant to add to his herd after the American border was closed.
By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO
and ELIZABETH BECKER
Published: March 4, 2005
OLIVER, British Columbia, March 2 - His yellow cowboy hat glowing in the fading sun, Bill Freding leaned an arm over the fence of a cattle pen and looked wistfully at his depleted herd.
"We have a capacity of 7,000 head," he said. "Now, we have a little over 1,000 in here."
Mr. Freding, 61, has not come close to filling his pens since the summer of 2003, when the discovery of mad cow disease in an Alberta beef cow forced the closing of the United States border to cattle.
He had been counting the days until March 7, when the United States was to reopen the border. But at the behest of American ranchers who say they fear that Canadian cattle are still infected, a federal judge in Montana issued a last-minute injunction this week to keep the border closed for now.
The closing has done more than wreak havoc on what used to be a model of cross-border cooperation between Canadian and American cattle ranchers. It has now jumped to the top of the political agenda between the countries.
[The Senate voted Thursday to try to block permanently the Agriculture Department's ruling that deemed Canadian cattle healthy enough to allow the border to be opened. Despite President Bush's threat to veto any bill, the House is expected to take up the measure soon.]
As global markets become more intertwined, this conflict between health concerns and business calculations is having a ripple effect around the world.
President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have lobbied Japan to open its market to American beef, a market that has been closed since the disease was found in an American cow. The reopening of the border with Canada, officials say, would provide the administration with a precedent for asking Japan to consider beef from the United States a minimal risk to health, too - a critical step for reviving the $7.5 billion beef and cattle industry.
"The consequences of keeping the border closed with Canada are pretty dire," said J. B. Penn, under secretary of agriculture and the administration's chief negotiator on mad cow issues. "It will make it difficult to go to other countries and tell them to open their borders with us on the same basis."
Most American cattle ranchers and many lawmakers disagree. They contend that opening the border will have the opposite effect. Noting that Canada has had four cases of mad cow disease while the single American incidence was found in a cow born in Canada, they said they fear that Canadian cattle will spread the disease to American herds and make it impossible to resume the beef trade with Japan.
Importing Canadian cattle now would be an "irresponsible and dangerous move," said Bill Bullard, the chief executive of Ranchers-Cattlemen's Action Legal Fund, the cattle group that won the injunction this week. Doing so, he added, would "put U.S. import standards lower than other major consuming nations."
That line of argument makes Canadian officials bristle. Their country follows the same rules as the United States to protect against bovine spongiform encephalopathy, the clinical name for mad cow disease, including a ban on cattle parts in cattle feed and the proper cleaning of slaughtered cattle.
"If the border does not open with us, it will be more difficult for the United States to convince Japan to open its borders to the U.S. or to Canada," said Claude Carriere, the diplomat in charge of trade at the Canadian Embassy in Washington. "It is sort of a golden rule."
The border closing in the summer of 2003 has wreaked havoc on a part of the United States and Canadian beef processing operations that once seemed a model of symbiotic cross-border cooperation.
Before the mad cow discovery, American cattle growers would often raise cattle from birth, send many of them to Canada to fatten them, then return them to the United States to be slaughtered and processed in the huge meatpacking plants in the Northwest and Upper Plains states.
After the border closing, Canadian cattle ranchers who had relied on meatpacking plants in the United States were forced to accept rock-bottom prices for scarce space at Alberta slaughterhouses. And packing plants in the United States found themselves with not enough cattle to kill, forcing slowdowns and temporary closings earlier this year and persistent talk in Western cattle country of more-permanent plant closings.
In western Canada, where the north-south relationship was especially strong, plummeting prices at auction led many cattle owners to simply butcher their cattle in their own backyards, said Ed Salle, vice president of the British Columbia Cattlemen's Association. Others took their herds to Alberta, the heart of the Canadian beef industry, to giant plants owned by Cargill, which is based in Minneapolis, and Tyson Foods, which has its headquarters in Springdale, Ark.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/04/business/worldbusiness/04beef.html?pagewanted=2&ei=5094&en=7c1ec078d8475b6a&hp&ex=1109998800&partner=homepage
Both Cargill and Tyson, whose Canadian operations earned fat profits from the border closing, are now expanding their Alberta plants. Canadian cattle ranchers, who for decades focused on ranching and feeding but left much of the marketing and processing to the Americans, are now making moves to become more self-sufficient. Last year Canada processed 26 percent more cattle, in large part because of an expansion in slaughtering capacity.
Indeed, beyond the expansions by the American-owned operations, a handful of other plants have opened up. Plans for at least two dozen more are on the drawing board.
A group of seven investors, including the British Columbia Livestock Producers Co-op, put up the money for a small plant in Salmon Arm, about three hour's drive from Mr. Freding's feedlots in Oliver.
Near Toronto, a group of more than 1,000 farmers has invested in a plant that started slaughtering cattle last August. Later this month, a group of Manitoba ranchers are planning to truck the equipment from a mothballed plant in Ferndale, Wash., roughly 1,500 miles so they can open a slaughterhouse close to their ranches.
While most of the new plants are privately financed, the Canadian government has pledged 66 million Canadian dollars ($53 million) in loan guarantees.
At the same time, the buildup of herds in Canada, done partly to supply those new processing plants and partly because low prices encouraged ranchers to postpone slaughtering their cattle, is largely responsible for the antipathy of American ranchers to the reopening of the border.
They contend that with Asian markets still closed, Canadian cattle will "pour over the U.S. borders," as the Organization for Competitive Markets, a Nebraska agricultural group, put it, probably slashing the price per head by as much as $240.
But major agribusiness interests in the United States want the border open to resume the old pattern of Canadian cattle being slaughtered in the United States, thereby avoiding any further plant closings. It is a rare instance where many ranchers disagree with the packing plants.
The main contention of nearly every cattle and beef association in the United States is that Canada is not adequately monitoring its cattle or its feed against mad cow disease. Senator Kent Conrad, the North Dakota Democrat who spearheaded the Senate vote, argues that there is no reason to rush to renew trade in live cattle with Canada until independent investigations prove the risk from the disease "has been reduced as significantly as possible."
[Mr. Conrad's measure passed with a vote of 52 to 46, reflecting a bipartisan antipathy to the administration's decision in Plains states and Rocky Mountain areas with high concentrations of ranchers.]
Dr. Alex Thiermann, the president of the terrestrial animal health commission of the World Organization for Animal Health, said that the Bush administration followed international scientific standards when it determined that Canada was a country with minimal risk of mad cow disease. But Dr. Thiermann stressed that this was a decision by a sovereign nation, not by his organization.
"All of our standards are recommendations, not yes or no answers," he said in a telephone interview from Paris. "Another country could come up with a different answer. It has to do with the quality of the information provided by the other country, in this case Canada."
The United States is hoping that Japan will reach the same conclusion in regard to American beef. That could prompt South Korea and Taiwan to reopen their markets, too. Tokyo has taken the first step toward such a determination, after Mr. Bush spoke to Junichiro Koizumi, the Japanese prime minister, at the United Nations last autumn.
Mr. Penn of the Agriculture Department said the administration was waiting for Japan to rewrite its regulations. In the meantime, opening the Canadian border could demonstrate that the United States follows the same scientific rules as it is asking Japan to follow. "I can promise that bringing Canadian cattle back into the U.S. won't infect the U.S. herd, absolutely," Mr. Penn said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/04/business/worldbusiness/04beef.html?pagewanted=3&ei=5094&en=7c1ec078d8475b6a&hp&ex=1109998800&partner=homepage
Despite that strong language, the administration has yet to decide whether to appeal the decision this week by the Federal District Court for Montana that led to the injunction against opening the border next Monday as planned.
Back in Canada, Mr. Freding is trying to keep his spirits up. A fourth-generation rancher, Mr. Freding's great-grandfather, John Fall Allison, followed the gold rush into British Columbia and became one of the region's first ranchers.
A heavyset man with a scraggy grayish-white beard, Mr. Freding hung up his lasso for the feeding business 17 years ago. His proximity to the border with the United States made his feedlots a popular destination for cattle from American ranchers. By 2003, some 60 percent of the cattle he fed were owned by ranchers in the United States.
But when the border closed in 2003, Mr. Freding got a shock.
The ban affected all cattle in Canada, regardless of origin. In addition to having to sell the 1,100 cattle he was feeding for a rancher in Washington State, he also had to unload about 1,300 of his own cattle in Alberta at giveaway prices.
Mr. Freding says he lost about 1.5 million Canadian dollars but about one-third of the losses were covered by the Canadian government. The owner of the 1,100 head of United States cattle that Mr. Freding was feeding lost more than $1 million and got no compensation from the United States government or insurance.
Since then Mr. Freding has hesitated to buy any more cattle of his own. He watched last year as Americans speculating that the border would open during the summer were badly burned.
These days he is relying on a different commodity, grapes, for most of his livelihood. He predicts they will account for 80 percent of his net income this year, up from 50 percent in 2003. His 135 acres of vineyards sit next to his sparsely filled cattle pens.
"They are the only thing that are keeping us going right now," he said. "We sure can't rely on the cattle business anymore."
Alexei Barrionuevo reported from British Columbia for this article, and Elizabeth Becker from Washington.
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