Meatpacker sparks mad cow testing fight

WASHINGTON - A Kansas meatpacker has sparked an industry fight by proposing testing all the company's cattle for mad cow disease.

Creekstone Farms Premium Beef wants to look for the disease in every animal it processes. The Agriculture Department has said no. Creekstone says it intends to sue the department.

"Our customers, particularly our Asian customers, have requested it over and over again," chief executive John Stewart said in an interview Wednesday. "We feel strongly that if customers are asking for tested beef, we should be allowed to provide that."

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Larger companies worry that Japanese buyers would insist on costly testing and that a suspect result might scare consumers away from eating beef.

USDA has sole control of the testing processes in meat plants. And its
officials say they have rejected Creekstone Farms' pleas because the
company's tests don't detect mad cow disease in animals younger than 30
months. Most U.S. beef comes from 12- to 18-month-old cows.

"The tests are not designed to detect BSE in younger animals," said Andrea
McNally, a spokeswoman for the USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection
Service. "So for Creekstone Farms to use the test to say its product is 100
percent BSE-free would be giving consumers a false sense of food safety, a
sense the test is not designed to give."

Creekstone's Pentz said the company knows that. But the issue, he said,
isn't whether the tests are effective, it's whether the federal government
should -- or can -- prevent a private business from meeting the legal
expectations of its customers. In this instance, the customers want the
testing.

"If you go to a grocery store in Japan today, in the meat section you'll see
a sticker on Japanese beef that says it's BSE-tested -- they're already
doing what they want us to do," Pentz said. "Our (Japanese) customers tell
us they want American beef, but it needs to have a BSE-tested sticker on
it," he said. "That's what we're trying to do and that's what USDA is
stopping us from doing."