Senior US officials pressed South Korea on Friday to go further in lifting a ban on importing US beef imposed because of mad cow disease.
The officials are putting similar pressure on Japan, which lifted its own ban last month and helped pave the way for such actions by Hong Kong and South Korea.
South Korea agreed early on Friday to resume shipments of US beef, which had been prohibited since the December 2003 discovery of mad cow disease in the US.
But a prohibition will remain on ribs and other bone-in beef, which keeps closed about 45 percent of the potential market. South Korea was worth a total of US$815 million to US producers in the year before the ban. The country once was the third-biggest customer of US beef behind Japan and Mexico.
The agreement is a positive step, but the Bush administration is "extremely disappointed" in South Korea's restrictions, US Trade Representative Rob Portman said.
"We will continue to urge Korea in the strongest terms to open its market without delay," Portman said.
Hours after South Korea agreed to accept US beef, Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns met in Washington with Japan's minister of agriculture, Shoichi Nakagawa. Like South Korea, Japan still imposes restrictions; no US beef is allowed from cows younger than 21 months.
Under international standards, US imports should include beef from animals up to 30 months of age as well as beef ribs. The guidelines are set by the World Organization for Animal Health in France.
Nakagawa said consumers in Japan view US beef as an entirely new product and that it will take time to reassure them fully. Japan has stricter standards than world guidelines and cannot make an exception for the US or any other country, Nakagawa said, speaking through an interpreter at a news conference with Johanns.
Exports to Japan resumed quickly last month. The US has regained about 82 percent of beef export markets worth US$3.9 billion in 2003.
Shipments to South Korea should resume by the end of March, South Korea's government said in a statement on Friday. Officials there want restrictions on bones out of fear that marrow and other bone tissues might be dangerous. US officials contend that international guidelines say those tissues can be safely traded.
The medical name for mad cow disease is bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE. BSE is a degenerative nerve disease in cattle. It's linked to a rare but fatal nerve disorder in humans, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, believed to be caused by eating meat or cattle products contaminated with mad cow disease.
The US has found two cases of mad cow disease, the first in 2003 in a Canadian-born cow in Washington state, the second last June in a Texas-born cow. Japan has found 21 cases of mad cow disease. South Korea has not found any cases of the disease, according to the World Organization for Animal Health.
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)