US hopes for meaty profits if exports to China resume

Nation's appetite for beef has increased in decade since restriction implemented

Indications that US beef exports to China may resume this year after a decade-long ban positions American farmers and ranchers for a big windfall, a beef industry economist said.

"China would add significantly to the portfolio of US beef export markets," Erin Borror, an economist with the US Meat Export Federation in Colorado, told China Daily on Monday.

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The world's fastest-growing beef market last year, and fifth-largest buyer of imported beef by volume, China is striving to work out issues that would allow imports of US beef to resume for the first time since 2003, when a Washington state outbreak of mad cow disease prompted Beijing and other buyers to restrict them, said Nancy Degner, executive director of the Iowa Beef Industry Council.

Mark Fischer, agriculture marketing manager with the Iowa Economic Development Authority and a member of an Iowa beef industry trade mission to China last month, wrote China Daily in an e-mail that although no date for a resumption of China-bound US beef exports has been set, "it is hoped that beef exports will resume" by fall.

"We are optimistic that the two countries are working to resume US beef exports," Fischer wrote. "Chinese demand for beef is growing, and the US has the ability to supply high-quality, grain-fed beef."

Potential buyers of US beef in China "want (the market) open", Degner said in an interview. Demand for beef in China has soared in the past two years, fueled by rising incomes and low domestic supply. Most of China's beef imports today are from Australia, Uruguay, New Zealand, Canada and Argentina.

Mad cow disease, formally known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, is a brain-wasting condition that typically affects cattle. Its nickname comes from its tendency to cause the animals it infects to stagger crazily. Humans who eat the meat of an infected cow can suffer a fatal degenerative brain disease that has no known cure. About 150 people are known to have died from the disease, mostly in the UK.