Mexico-Meat ban on 30 United States meat plants by Mexico.

MEXICO.

30 US MEAT PLANTS BANNED ON Friday 26 December.

Mexico has banned 30 large beef plants from exporting into their country, along with poultry and pork companies. The list of banned plants reads like a who’s who of the meat industry, Tyson Foods, JBS-Swift, Smithfield Group, Cargill Inc and Seaboard.

While no official explanation has been given, we were told direct from Mexico that this is a government tit for tat, against the high handed way in which the Bush administration handled the salmonella out break on tomato’s a few months ago, blaming Mexico and a reaction to the new imposed laws on Country of Origin Labeling, known as COOL.

Jim Herlihy of the US Meat Exporters Federation, said "Exporters have been warned for months that they could face reprisals for meat at point of entry violations and this could take weeks to resolve".

Fernando Lopez, a large trader and processor in Mexico, said "The US today enjoys the worse record in the world, for health violations, lack of accountability and cover up by the USDA, they just think they can do as they please, they will see that they can not".

Mexico is the largest buyer of US beef on a regular 52 week of the year business.

It was apparent in 2003 to industry experts and apparent to all today, that the current administration in Washington had no idea of the fall-out that would come from one single downer cow, located in a meat plant lairage with the staggers.

The ear tag was taken from the cow and taken to the office, it should then been a matter of 30 minutes for the USDA to identify the origin of the case. There was a cover up when it was realized the cow most likely was suffering from BSE.

It took six days for the USDA to get the story they wanted out to the press, the initial comments were "We cannot identify the cow", The ear tag would have given tah information immediately. Then making matters worse the cow was identified as being from Canada, had these been the case again the ear tag would have indicated this in 30 minutes.

Finally there was a terrible mix up in communication and the story went from bad to worse, this in itself is bad enough, but it was repeated to the letter with the recently out break of salmonella, only this time Mexico got the blame and not Canada.