NEW ORLEANS -- Two provincial agriculture ministers from Canada attended a meeting of U.S. farm officials over the weekend, building cross-border relationships one of the Canadians said will be useful in preventing outbreaks of mad cow disease. The meeting of legislative agricultural chairs, made up of state agricultural officials from the 50 U.S. states, was planned before the discovery Dec. 22 that a Holstein cow born in Canada and slaughtered in Washington state had been infected with the brain-wasting disease.
But mad cow was a hot topic among the Canadian and American officials in hallways outside the meeting's seminars, even though the subject was not on the agenda, said Clay Serby, Saskatchewan's agriculture minister.
"It dominated our private discussions. We talked about it all the time," Serby said in an interview yesterday.
Serby and Steve Peters, Ontario's agriculture minister, spoke with many of the U.S. officials about the necessity of improving the systems used by both countries to track the whereabouts of all North American cattle, which would make it easier to follow the path of infected animals, Serby said.
Mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, eats holes in the brains of cattle and is incurable. Scientists believe humans can develop a brain-wasting illness, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, from eating beef from diseased cattle. An Alberta cow tested positive for the disease last May.
U.S. agriculture officials have said they've tracked down just 19 of the 80 cows that entered the U.S. along with the Holstein infected with mad cow. The U.S. lacks a modern tracking and identification system that could have eased the search for the origins of the infected cow and for others in its herd.
Canada has a mandatory cattle-tagging system and will introduce a more effective system of electronic chips in cattle by 2005, Serby said. The current U.S. tagging system, which is not mandatory, puts markers on the ears of cattle.
Serby and Peters were the only officials from outside the U.S. invited to the group's second annual meeting. Between them, the Canadians met all the U.S. officials who attended.
The Canadians made agreements with all the U.S. officials to remain in contact to share information about mad cow and other farm issues, Serby said.
"There's a real importance to understanding how we do business in one another's countries, and it's important to keep these lines of communication open," Serby said.
The recent mad cow discoveries have caused trade tension among the U.S., Canada and Mexico.
Officials from the three countries met Friday to discuss mad cow, but failed to reach an agreement on reopening their borders to beef products and live cattle.
The U.S. has been pressing Mexico, a large market for American beef, to lift its total ban on U.S. beef and cattle that was imposed last month.
Canada wants the U.S., its biggest trading partner in cattle and beef, Mexico and other countries to lift restrictions that took effect after the Canadian mad cow case in May.
Serby said the U.S. restrictions have caused a $1-billion drop in revenue in the Canadian beef industry, in addition to lost jobs and damages to related industries, such as trucking.
