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USDA on Korea........Creekstone

Mike

Well-known member
Today 12/1/2006 1:44:00 PM

US Cattle Association Wants US To Halt Beef Trade With S. Korea



WASHINGTON (AP)--Cattle ranchers want the U.S. government to halt beef trade with South Korea because the country is blocking shipments from a meatpacker in Kansas.



In a letter to the Bush administration on Friday, the National Cattlemen's Beef Association said, "It is clear that commercially viable beef trade can't take place with South Korea."



The group's president, Missouri rancher Mike John, said trade shouldn't resume without assurance from South Korea that it will follow agreed-upon rules for trade.



Last week, South Korea suspended imports from Creekstone Farms Premium Beef because authorities said they found a bone fragment in boneless beef. Creekstone raises Black Angus cattle in Kentucky and slaughters them in Kansas.



U.S. beef shipments had resumed only recently, after lengthy negotiations with South Korea, which banned U.S. beef after the discovery of mad cow disease in 2003 in Washington state.



The country was a major buyer of U.S. beef, purchasing more than $1.2 billion in beef products in the year before the ban, according to the Agriculture Department. Only Japan was a bigger market, worth $1.4 billion annually until closing its market due to mad cow disease.



Both countries have agreed to accept only boneless beef from the U.S. because some Asian countries consider bone to carry a greater risk for mad cow disease. That is stricter than international rules, which deem many bone-in cuts of beef to be safe. U.S. Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns has harshly criticized South Korea, arguing that officials there had "invented" a standard for imports.



"They have applied a standard we did not agree to. It was a standard that they invented along the way," Johanns said Tuesday in Washington.



He said the shipment was 7 tons of beef and that the bone fragment was actually a small piece of cartilage.



The cattlemen's group represents more than 230,000 cattle breeders, producers and feeders in the U.S.



Source: Dow Jones Newswire
 

PORKER

Well-known member
Yup, that would stop Creekstone from BSE testing, Packers tied at the hip of NCBA over an over. Just look at the crap going on in eastern Canada.
 
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