Soaring meat prices in Japan present an opportunity to get international borders reopened to North American beef.
Canada is focused on getting the United States to reopen its border to Canadian live cattle. That is important, but it will be politically more palatable to the Americans to free up trade with Canada if they get their export markets back.
Beef prices are soaring in Japan because domestic and other foreign suppliers, such as Australia, can’t keep up with the hole left by the U.S and Canada, who together supplied more than 50 percent of Japan’s beef imports until recently.
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The average price of imported frozen beef at the end of January rose to $4.58 Cdn per 100 grams, while the retail price of domestic beef rose to $8.44 per 100 g.
Wholesale pork prices soared 40 percent in the last couple of weeks as restaurants and consumers switch to avoid high priced beef.
Many Japanese fast food chains that serve gyudon, a popular beef-on-rice dish, are pulling it from their menu because they can’t get affordable beef. For the Japanese, this is like McDonald’s pulling hamburgers from its menu.
Anne Dunford of Canfax said last week that Asian meat distributors and restaurants are among the best allies North America has in its effort to get its beef back into Japan. North American beef producers must ally themselves with them to attack one of the two legs supporting Japanese BSE policy: support for farmers and consumer fears.
To curry favour with the small but politically powerful Japanese beef industry, the government wants to limit beef imports. It was doing it with quotas but now is using BSE controls.
To curry favour with consumers, the government makes strong statements about protecting food safety, demanding that every slaughtered beef animal be tested for BSE.
But at what point will rising beef costs cause the consumer to question the shaky scientific legitimacy of the government’s stand on food safety? Before the U.S. case of BSE in December, Canada was alone in pressing Japan to change its policy, but now, the U.S. is applying its formidable weight.
The Canadian and American beef industries and governments must work with Japan’s food industry to spark protests from Japanese citizens about this wrong-headed beef ban that is squeezing their pocketbooks.
