EXPORTS BOOM, TROUBLE AT HOME

The news comes at a time of booming beef exports, with total shipments reaching a record last year thanks to expanding markets in countries like Russia and Canada, according to Commerce Department data.

But exports to Japan, Mexico and South Korea, which bought more than 80 percent of U.S. beef and veal exports in 2003, have yet to match their earlier peaks, with many of them maintaining certain restrictions that may help temper any fallout.

Mexico, which buys more U.S. beef than any other country, said it has no plans to halt imports and that it would maintain the same regimen of inspections for trade across the border.

It’s also been a difficult period in the domestic market, with firms still reeling from fallout over a ground beef filler that critics called “pink slime”, which was pulled from grocery store shelves and forced one producer to idle several factories and another to file for bankruptcy.

Tyson’s shares closed up 1.5 percent at $17.93 on Tuesday, triple the gain of the wider stock market. JBS shares closed down 0.3 percent in Sao Paolo.

Beef exports plunged nearly 75 percent in 2004 in the wake of the first U.S. incident in late-2003, with USDA reporting net cancellations of beef sales in five out of the first six weeks following the news. Overall beef exports were 321,967 tonnes in 2004, down from 1.27 million tonnes in the previous year.

Sales would not rebound to more than 1 million tonnes until 2010. The value of U.S. beef exports totaled $809 million in 2004, down from $3.86 billion in 2003, according to the U.S. Meat Export Federation.

MAD COW

BSE, or mad cow, is a neurological disease caused by an abnormal form of a protein called a prion and can damage the central nervous system of cattle.

Greater awareness, surveillance and control over animal feed has helped contain the disease; last year 29 cases were diagnosed worldwide, down from under 200 in 2007, the American Meat Institute says.

Reported cases peaked in peaked at 37,316 in 1992, 99.9 percent of which were in Britain, according to the Office of the United States Trade Representative.

Experts insisted that as the dairy cow had not been eaten by other animals, there was no risk of the disease being spread, and estimated the chance of an animal spontaneously contracting the disease at about one in a million.

“There’s always been concern that there could potentially be a spontaneous form of mad cow disease that just arrives and doesn’t get transmitted through feed,” George Gray, director of George Washington University’s Center for Risk Science and Public Health.

“It’s not like classic mad cow disease that’s transmitted by animals being exposed to the infectious parts of other animals.”

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By Roberta Rampton