Uniteds States-Regime change at the FDA can only help farmers.

UNITED STATES-COMMON SENSE AT LAST IN FDA.

The Food and Drug Administration’s plan to postpone a

law aimed at preventing the spread of mad-cow disease has some former officials

in the administration of George W. Bush concerned about the effect on

international beef trade.

Promises to implement the law, commonly known as the "feedban," were

instrumental in deals that increased U.S. beef exports to South Korea last year

and kept countries like Japan at the negotiating table, according to officials

involved with those trade negotiations.

The Bush administration officials asked not to be named in this story.

Talks with South Korea to ease restrictions on U.S. beef were at a standstill

last year, one official said, and the U.S. needed to give something to South

Korean negotiators to demonstrate how the U.S. was improving safety conditions.

South Korean negotiators, the official said, "felt very strongly they needed

to be able to point to some changes."

The second Bush administration official interviewed for this story said there

was no specific "quid pro quo" when it came to dealing with the South Koreans,

but also stressed that U.S. negotiators "recognized it would help if [South

Korea ] had something they could tout."

Getting the U.S. government to implement a new feedban law - something it had

been postponing because of the extra operating costs that would be thrust on

the livestock and meat industries - would be a victory for South Korean

negotiators.

The new FDA feedban, a stricter version of the original implemented in 1997,

was unveiled in April 2008. The U.S. and South Korea reached an agreement in

June 2008 that resulted in a resumption of beef trade.

South Korea banned U.S. beef in December 2003 after the first case of bovine

spongiform encephalopathy, or mad-cow disease, was discovered here. South Korea

partially lifted that ban in September 2006 to allow only boneless cuts from

cattle under 30 months of age, but disputes over bone fragments in U.S.

shipments repeatedly shut down trade.

The 2008 deal allowed South Korea to maintain its ban on beef from older

cattle, but it also opened up that market to bone-in product such as short

ribs.

Upon learning the FDA was planning to postpone implementation of the feedban,

the second Bush administration official said: "Oh my goodness. That’s not

good."

A third Bush administration official, also involved in negotiating the

resumption of beef trade, warned that South Korea is easily upset when it comes

to perceived beef safety issues.

"They don’t recognize how volatile those markets are," the third official

said of the current administration of Barack Obama.

The risk is that a country like South Korea is spooked and puts new

restrictions on U.S. beef at a time when domestic prices are already low, that

official said. That would be "unconscionable."

The FDA announced on April 7 that it intends to push back the implementation

date for the new feedban to June 26 from the originally scheduled start date of

April 27.

The U.S. livestock and meat industries have had a year to adjust to the rule

but the FDA said they still need more time.

The new feedban would mandate removing brains and spinal cord from carcasses

of older cattle before they can be rendered into any type of animal feed. The

1997 feedban only required that the brains and spinal cords be removed from

cattle feed.

BSE can be spread among cattle if they are fed ground up material from

infected cattle. That’s how the disease originally spread so rapidly in the

U.K. and it’s why the FDA banned feeding bovine material to cattle in 1997.

That 1997 feed ban wasn’t enough, though, according to the FDA, because other

non-livestock feed could be infected and could get mixed up with cattle feed.

Since the initial finding of BSE in December 2003, the U.S. has reported two

more cases of the disease. BSE is a degenerative disease affecting the central

nervous system of cattle and is always fatal. Humans who eat contaminated beef

can contract variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

Max Thornsberry, president of the U.S.-based cattle group R-CALF United

Stockgrowers of America, warned this week that the BSE threat is still real.

"There is no justifiable reason for the FDA to delay the enhanced feed ban," he said.