Obama calls for Japan to drop limits on beef imports

WASHINGTON (Kyodo) Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama urged Japan and South Korea on Friday to scrap all their controls on U.S. beef imports and fully open their beef markets.

"You can't get beef into Japan and Korea, even though, obviously, we have the highest safety standards of anybody," he told a town hall meeting in Watertown, South Dakota. "They don't want to have that competition from U.S. producers."

"So we've got to have a president who's a tougher negotiator and, when we have tougher negotiations, that means that other countries are going to have to allow us to sell into their markets."

The Japanese and South Korean restrictions on U.S. beef were put in place to limit the risk of mad cow disease, which has struck cattle at least three times in the United States and much more in Japan.

The formal name for mad cow disease is bovine spongiform encephalopathy, a degenerative nerve disease in cattle that has been linked to a fatal human form of the brain-wasting illness called variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

South Korea relaxed its import rules on U.S. beef last month, but Japan and the United States are still at loggerheads over U.S. insistence that Tokyo abolish all restrictions on U.S. beef imports, including one that limits imported meat to that from cattle aged 20 months or younger.

Of particular ire to the U.S. is that Japan tests every head of cattle headed for consumption. The U.S. refuses to do so, despite support for the measure from smaller meat factories.

The two nations have been talking about relaxing Japan's food-safety terms since last June.