Embassy Row

Canadian mad cows

Canadian Ambassador Michael Kergin scolded a leading U.S. senator for accusing Canada of failing to control mad cow disease.

Mr. Kergin wrote Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle to complain about “factual errors” and “incorrect assumptions” in a letter the South Dakota Democrat wrote to U.S. Agriculture Secretary Ann M. Veneman.

He said Canadian beef is as safe as U.S. meat and that both countries have adopted nearly identical methods to prevent the spread of the disease.

Mr. Daschle’s letter was signed by nine other senators, including Democrats Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and John Kerry, the other Massachusetts senator and presumptive Democratic presidential candidate.

The senators, in their April 7 letter, complained about a rule under consideration by the Department of Agriculture that “would lift the ban on imports of live cattle from Canada.”

The United States last year imposed the restrictions after one cow in Canada and one in Washington state that was bred in Canada were diagnosed with mad cow disease, formally known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy.

The senators questioned whether Canada has taken effective measures to control the disease and prevent infected meat or live cattle from being exported to the United States.

They said they are “deeply concerned” that the Department of Agriculture is “placing U.S. consumers and cattle producers at risk.”

The United States “should not become the dumping ground for the beef and cattle that no other major beef- and cattle-importing country, except Mexico, will accept,” they said.

Mr. Kergin last week said the senators incorrectly accused Canada of failing to meet U.S. standards and ignored steps his country took in 1997 to prevent the spread of the disease. The infected cows were born before those measures were adopted.

He said the senators failed to acknowledge “two basic scientifically proven facts.” The disease is not found in beef muscle meat, but only in “certain tissues referred to as specified-risk material,” such as brains and spinal cords that sometimes are mixed into beef at slaughterhouses. They were removed from the human food chain last year in Canada and in January by the United States, Mr. Kergin said.

“This means that any beef produced in either a Canadian or an American packing plant is safe for humans to eat,” the ambassador said.

Pakistan ’amused’

A Pakistani official yesterday said his government is growing “amused” by comments from the U.S. ambassador to neighboring Afghanistan, but still plans to file a formal protest with Washington.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Masood Khan told reporters in the capital, Islamabad, that American Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad is trying to “seek attention” by his repeated claims that Pakistan is failing to shut down base camps that terrorists use to organize raids into Afghanistan.

“In the beginning, there was indignation in Islamabad, but now we are amused because we think he is pushing the envelope to seek attention,” Mr. Khan said. “Ambassador Khalilzad tends to forget that he is accredited to Afghanistan, not to Pakistan. … He is new to the job and diplomacy.”

Nevertheless, Mr. Khan said, his government “will lodge a protest to the U.S. government on the foolish and irresponsible utterances.”

Mr. Khalilzad last month told the Associated Press that “several key” figures of Afghanistan’s former Taliban regime and “some of the remaining al Qaeda leaders are in the border area on the [Pakistani] side.”

In Washington earlier this month, he told the Center for Strategic and International Studies that the Bush administration has warned “the Pakistani leadership that either they must solve this problem, or we will have to do it ourselves.”

• Call Embassy Row at 202/636-3297, fax 202/832-7278 or e-mail jmorrison@washingtontimes.com.