Japanese cattle farmers insist their beef is safe to eat, a view officially endorsed by the government on Friday, but the reassurances have come too late for Mamoru Kokubun.
The Japanese public's aversion to beef, sparked by the discovery of mad cow disease in Japan has already forced the 54-year-old farmer to shut his family-run steakhouse and stop selling cows.
PHOTO: AFP
"I'm very worried at the moment, but there is nothing I can do," said Kokubun who owns a small cattle farm in Saitama, north of Tokyo, and recently branched out into the restaurant business.
"My dream had always been to raise cows and use the meat straight away in my own restaurant to feed customers fresh beef," he said. "But as soon as the first case of BSE [bovine spongiform encephelopathy], was found, customer numbers fell by 80 percent.
"It was awful ... so I decided to close shop," Kokubun said.
Japan has lost its appetite for beef ever since confirmation from the government last month that Asia's first case of the brain wasting illness was found in a holstein dairy cow from a farm in Chiba east of Tokyo.
Demand for locally produced and imported beef here has dropped 30 percent, according to a European food expert, and prices for medium quality meat are about 20 percent lower than usual after touching a base point of negative 47 percent on Sept. 25.
The discovery of BSE dealt a devastating blow to Kokubun's farming business and steakhouse venture, the Cow Barbecue, which will close on Oct. 28.
"The restaurant cost around ?60 million [US$500,000] to build and that hurts as there are still some debts left over," Kokubun said.
A large poster of smiling cartoon cows hangs over the entrance to the steakhouse -- run by Kokubun's wife Mariko and daughter Shizuka -- where customers once flocked in the hundreds to barbecue chunks of beef.
But now the family and their 500-strong herd, kept in four barns around the back of the Cow Barbecue, have little reason for cheer as the restaurant remains virtually empty in its dying days, and the underlying farm business stutters to a halt.
The price of cattle has nosedived since mad cow surfaced on Sept. 10, with fears over the possible spread of BSE growing as the government conducts nationwide medical tests on 1.3 million cows, although only the one case has been reported to-date.
"It is [over] a month since the discovery and I have not sold one single cow," Kokubun said, leaning on a gate at one of his barns as a group of black cows munched hay behind him.
"Before, they went for about ?550,000 each ... but a friend recently sold a cow for just ?160,000 when he initially paid over ?200,000 for it, so I will definitely not sell at the moment.
"I am just watching events unfold," he sighed, admitting that he will have to sell off some cows within six months, even if it means booking a loss, or they would pass their prime and become worthless.
"You also have to consider the cost of keeping them, with feed, electricity and water, it comes to about ?10,000 per cow a month," the farmer said.
Kokubun believes his herd should be safe to eat as he never fed them meat and bonemeal feed (MBM), which is suspected as the prime infection route of the disease in European countries such as Britain afflicted with BSE.
"But the worry is that I do not know if the same is true for the parents [of my cows] ... we do not know if the mother had mad cow disease or not, so I could not say there is a 0 percent chance of the disease [at my farm]."
Kokubun and his family still enjoy platefuls of beef, maintaining that they are far more likely to die in a car crash or take their own life than fall foul of mad cow disease.
"Around 20,000 people in Japan die from car accidents a year while 30,000 commit suicide ... no one has died of mad cow here yet so I do not understand the reason for the panic," he said.
But Japan's health ministry said last week a teenage girl is suffering a condition which it feared may be the fatal new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease -- the human version of mad cow -- believed to be caused by consuming infected beef.
The condition has already killed about 100 people in Britain since the mid-1980s.
With beef unlikely to be flavor of the month in Japan for a while, despite government assurances it is safe to eat, Kokubun knows he and the rest of the farming community are in for a tough time. But he is determined to weather the storm for now with help from the government and local community.
"[Tokyo] will give us a month's worth of feed, and I can borrow up to two million yen for the year if I have to," he said.
"I do not know how things will unfold, but I plan to keep going for five years ... but if things don't improve by then, I will not be able to continue ... so I could go into early retirement."
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