VOLYS STAR started producing Premium Halal Poultry Products for the French market some 30 years ago.

The company’s Halal experience was rewarded with leadership positions in other Halal markets in, amongst others, Asia and the Middle East.

Teaming up with AYTAC FOODS, VOLYS STAR products, which are available in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Dubai, are now also available at Tesco’s in the UK. They will be starting with their Sliced Smoked Turkey Rashers. A must for anyone who wants to have a Halal BLT!

Related posts:

1. Malaysia: Tesco to increase local SME products to be sold in China They also want to encourage more Halal food suppliers who...
2. Six Local Firms Export RM460 Million Halal Products Via Tesco UK KUALA LUMPUR - Six Malaysian companies have to date managed...
3. UK: Arson probe after Gafoor Poultry Products factory fire This follows Gafoor’s recent successful application for British Retail Consortium...
4. UK/UAE: “Rock star” Islamic scholars a risk for Islamic finance There are over 400 sharia scholars worldwide but only around...
5. Canada: Kraft calls on star chefs to capture immigrant market Major North American food companies have been expanding their overseas...

Products ranging from Aberdeen-Angus steaks to roast-beef flavoured potato crisps will soon be available in UAE restaurants and on supermarket shelves.

UK Trade and Investment, working closely with the Ministry of Environment and Water in the UAE and the Department of Food and Rural Affairs in the UK, were instrumental in getting the ban lifted.

Director of UK Trade and Investment in Dubai, Ian Gibbons, said: “The UAE is an important market for the UK and there is already a very healthy demand for British food products. I have recently arrived in the UAE and am impressed by the incredible range of international products available, which is testament to the nature of the country as a true international hub. UK products are more widely available than in many other countries. The lifting of the British beef ban is significant as it means greater opportunity for UK suppliers.”

Related posts:

1. Indonesia lifts ban on New Zealand beef exports, says minister Indonesia has lifted a week-old ban on imported beef from...
2. Indonesia Lifts Ban on New Zealand Beef Imports, Group Says Indonesia, Asia’s third-most populous country, lifted a ban on imports...
3. British Airways launches new ‘taste team’ It is a good sign - and good business sense...
4. Chicken injected with beef waste sold in UK Muslims and Jews conned into eating meat bulked out with...
5. UK: British Group creates int’l Halal certification programme The Halal Authority Board (HAB) in the UK has designed...

Related posts:

1. UK: Inspectors swoop on Glasgow Halal butchers Food safety officers have swooped on Glasgow’s halal butchers after...
2. UK: New report offers a unique insight into the Halal market The unique report, entitled ‘The Halal meat market: Specialist supply...
3. UK: First Halal School of Excellence for Halal Butchers With 3500 Independent Halal Butchers in the UK, Janan Meat...
4. UK – Halal meat getting recognition at long last A research project has been commissioned by the newly-formed Halal...
5. France: Butchers beef up French presidential campaign President Nicolas Sarkozy has lamented the decline of the traditional...

New Halal Legislation is being planned for implementation in the UK by January 2013 and is currently undergoing ‘consultation’. This follows amendments to the European Legislation Law 1099 issued earlier this year. These new laws pose some of the biggest threats to the continuance of Halal in a generation. It is time for the Muslim community to sit up and pay attention.

Week after week, articles are being published calling for the ban of religious slaughter or restricting the production of religious slaughter (both kosher and Halal). These are being voiced by various groups including, Animal Welfare lobbies, Christian far right, veterinarians, secularist groups and the tabloid press.Watch carefully as story after story is released often carrying mis-information aimed at demonising the Halal brand and the religious needs of the 3 million+ Muslims in this country. Biased views and the threat of Islam are being used to justify the indefensible.

HMC says it is time to wake up to this threat and be counted.

The latest attack came from a leading vet Bill Reilly who criticised religious slaughter on Saturday 5th May and the timing seems very deliberate as the Government prepares its consultation papers on the new EU Legislation 1099, due at the end of this month.

HMC, which has been at the forefront of protecting Halal and the prophetic method of religious slaughter calls upon the Muslim community to unite and defend the prophetic method of slaughter and be prepared to respond to the consultation paper due out at the end of the May.

The Legislation draft we expect, will undoubtedly carry unbalanced laws aimed at making religious slaughter more difficult, possibly limiting its production and increasing costs for the Halal industry. They are promoted under the banner of animal welfare, but they are purely there to carry the biased views being promoted by various groups telling Muslims how we should produce and eat Halal!

Stunning is being promoted, yet many methods of stunning which were promoted as best welfare for animals over the past 20 years are now being phased out due to being cruel. In fact some stunning methods that are described as cruel by The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) and have been recommended to be phased out have been ignored by the European Commission citing economic reasons! “Recommendations to phase out the use of carbon dioxide for pigs and the use of waterbath stunners for poultry are not included in this Regulation because the impact assessment revealed that such recommendations were not economically viable at present in the EU”.

The prophetic method remains the most humane method of slaughter and for the majority of Muslims an absolute requirement for the observance of their faith. Many Western countries including the United States recognise this method as humane in statute. Muslims and Jews believe that their method of slaughter when done properly with good standards is better than any other method available.

Labelling non-stunned meat and poultry

There are also strong calls from many quarters to label un-stunned meat and poultry. Although, HMC is in favour of labelling in principle, we feel the current calls are bias towards demonising un-stunned slaughter, rather than being in the interests of consumers.

Of course, every consumer has a right to know what they are eating, and therefore HMC calls on fair and impartial labelling, through the labelling of all meat and poultry and not only un-stunned. Let us label meat that has been shot with a captive bolt gun, gassed, electrocuted, drowned or mis-stunned, and then we can also label un-stunned, giving real information to consumers.

Related posts:

1. Religious Slaughter Safeguarded by EU A regulation protecting religious slaughter in the European Union was...
2. End ‘cruel’ religious slaughter, say scientists The Farm Animal Welfare Council (UK) says that slitting the...
3. UK: Religious slaughter meat should be labelled? Jim Paice, the food and farming minister, has told the...
4. Australia: Call for meat slaughter method labelling Senator Bernardi said he wanted labels on packaging to explain...
5. UK: ANSA welcomes withdrawal of proposed Dutch religious slaughter ban The Association of Non Stun Abattoirs (ANSA), an industry body...

Some member states supported the Swedish delegation mentioning a possible overuse of the possibility to slaughter animals without preliminary stunning in certain member states. The Commission recalled the existing EU framework and pointed out that its implementation rely on subsidiarity. Recommendations on ritual slaughtering have been published in 2011 and a study is ongoing to evaluate the opportunity for informing the consumer on this type of slaughtering.

According to directive 93/119, animals should be stunned before slaughter. However, in the case of animals subject to particular methods of slaughter requested by certain religious rites this requirement does not apply. Certain member states seem to use largely this possibility of slaughter without stunning although this is not foreseen by the legislator.

Considering that there is an increasing interest among consumers for animal welfare, Sweden therefore incitated other member states to take appropriate action to avoid misuse of religious exemptions to stunning. The Commission could initiate for example targeted controls performed by the Food and Veterinary Office (FVO), prepare an harmonised procedure for approval and control of operators performing unstunned slaughter. Furthermore, Sweden suggests that specific labelling may be a tool.

Related posts:

1. Australia: Ministers to discuss banning religious exemptions from stunning Australia's primary industries ministers tomorrow will discuss whether to ban...
2. Australia: RSPCA wants stunning exemptions killed THE RSPCA is renewing calls for a ban on slaughter...
3. Jordon: Princess Alia bint al-Hussein of Jordan calls for cattle stunning before slaughter THE King of Jordan's sister has been asking Australia's agriculture...
4. EU: Dutch approve ban on religious animal slaughter The Dutch parliament passed a bill Tuesday banning the slaughter...
5. UK: Top Vets slams ‘unacceptable’ slaughter of animals without prior stunning Prof Reilly’s comments come as the Welsh Government is preparing...

by Alliance for Natural Health

More and more countries are banning imports of American food products for safety reasons.

Last week, Indonesia became the first country to halt imports of US beef following the discovery of an American dairy cow infected with mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy. The disease is fatal to cows and can cause a deadly brain disease in people who eat tainted beef.

“We will lift the ban as soon as the US can assure us its dairy cows are free of mad cow disease,” said Rusman Heriawan, Indonesia’s vice agriculture minister. “It could be one month or one year. It depends on how long it takes to resolve this case.”

One would think the US government would immediately test beef to make sure it’s safe. But the USDA, which regulates the test, administers it to less than 1% of slaughtered cows. Worse, until 2007 it was illegal for private beef producers to test their own cows for the disease! Larger meat companies feared that if smaller producers tested their meat and advertised it as safe from mad cow disease, they too might be forced to test all their cows—so they persuaded USDA to block individual producers from doing the test. In 2007 a federal judge said this practice could no longer stand.

The highest risk occurs if animals or humans eat infected brain or nerve tissue. Meat unconnected to bone, milk, and hooves are supposed to be safe, but who knows for sure? The ultimate source of mad cow, of course, is the filthy and disease-ridden (not to mention inhumane) conditions in CAFOs, or concentrated animal feedlot operations.

In February, Taiwan began refusing meat products from the US because they contain ractopamine, a leanness- and growth-promoting drug used widely in pork and beef production in the United States. Taiwan has a zero-tolerance policy for the drug.

Related posts:

1. Indonesia suspends US beef imports over mad cow fears US Health authorities have said the diseased animal was never...
2. How Safe is Cloned Meat? With the US Food and Drug Administration already concluding that...
3. Making sure our food is safe to eat More than just a Halal certificate is necessary these days,...
4. Brazil – More Halal beef for Arab countries More Halal beef for Arab countries - Egypt, Libya and...
5. Australia: Ministers to discuss banning religious exemptions from stunning Australia's primary industries ministers tomorrow will discuss whether to ban...

The British “debate” about meat, animal cruelty and ritual slaughter has become a proxy for deep fears about Muslims in our midst.

I am sitting in one of London’s finest Indian restaurants, Benares, in the heart of Mayfair. I’ve just placed an order for the “Tandoori Ratan” mixed-grill appetiser – a trio of fennel lamb chop, chicken cutlet and king prawn.

I’ll be honest with you: I’m pretty excited. Most of the upmarket restaurants in London do not cater for the city’s burgeoning Muslim population. Benares is one of the few exceptions: all of the lamb and chicken dishes on its menu are halal.

The restaurant opened in 2003 and its owner, Atul Kochhar, is a Michelin-starred chef. “Right from day one, we’ve kept our lamb and chicken halal,” Kochhar says. “It was a very conscious decision because I grew up in India, a secular country, where I was taught to have respect for all religions.” Kochhar, who is a Hindu, says Muslims make up “easily between 10 and 20 per cent” of his regular diners. It isn’t just a taste for religious pluralism that has dictated the contents of his menu; serving halal meat makes commercial, as well as cultural, sense.

To other, perhaps less tolerant types, however, the rise and rise of halal meat in the west and here in the UK, in particular, is a source of tension, controversy, fear and loathing. British Muslims are living through a period of halal hysteria, a moral panic over our meat. First there came 9/11, 7/7 and the “Islamic” terror threat; then there was the row over the niqab (face veil) and hijab (headscarf); now, astonishingly, it’s the frenzy over halal meat.

Last month, MPs in the Commons rejected a ten-minute-rule bill that would have made it mandatory for retailers to label all of the halal and kosher meat on sale and make it clear on the packaging that the animals were “killed without stunning”. The bill’s proponent, the Tory backbencher Philip Davies, claimed that the meat was being “forced upon” shoppers “without their knowledge”. It was defeated by the narrowest of margins – 73 votes to 70.

As is so often the case, the right-wing press is behind much of the fear-mongering and misinformation. “Britain goes halal . . . but no one tells the public,” screamed the front-page headline in the Mail on Sunday on 19 September 2010. The paper claimed that supermarkets, restaurants, schools, hospitals, pubs and big sporting venues such as Wembley Stadium were “controversially serving up meat slaughtered in accordance with strict Islamic law to unwitting members of the public”.

The following week, readers were treated to two more stories suggesting a sinister plot to inflict halal meat on innocent, animal-loving, non-Muslim Britons. “How 70 per cent of New Zealand lamb imports to Britain are halal . . . but this is NOT put on the label”, said the Daily Mail on 25 September 2010. “Top supermarkets secretly sell halal: Sainsbury’s, Tesco, Waitrose and M&S don’t tell us meat is ritually slaughtered,” proclaimed the Mail on Sunday the next day.

With the threat from terrorism receding, Britain’s Islam-baiters have jumped on the anti-halal bandwagon, and not just the neo-fascists of the British National Party and the English Defence League, which has a page on its website devoted to its (anti-) “halal campaign”, but mainstream commentators, too. The Spectator’s Rod Liddle – who once wrote a column entitled “Islamophobia? Count me in” – has demanded that halal meat be banned and called for a boycott of Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury and the rest until they agree to stop stocking halal products. “I will buy no meat from supermarkets,” he wrote, rather melodramatically, back in 2010.

In this year’s French presidential election, candidates seemed to spend more time discussing halal meat than rising unemployment or the ballooning budget deficit. Marine Le Pen, leader of the Front National, alleged that “all the abattoirs in the Paris region sell halal meat without exception”, while the outgoing president, Nicolas Sarkozy, claimed that the halal issue was a “central concern” for French voters. (For the record, halal constitutes 2 per cent of all the meat sold in Paris.)

Last year in the Netherlands, the lower house of parliament approved a bill, introduced by the Party for the Animals (PvdD) and backed by the Islamophobe Geert Wilders’s Freedom Party, to have all ritually slaughtered meat, including halal and kosher, banned. The Dutch government refused to sign off on the bill but agreed to appoint a commission to consider tighter procedures for slaughter.

Stun guns

So, what is it about halal that provokes such anger and hysteria? The word literally means “lawful” and refers to any object – not just food – or action or behaviour that is deemed permissible under Islamic law.

For meat to be considered halal, three conditions must be met:

1) The animal must be healthy and uninjured and, crucially, it must be killed with a cut.
2) All the blood must be drained from the animal’s body.
3) The slaughterer must recite the appropriate Islamic prayer at the time of slaughter.

Islam, like Judaism, prescribes a single-cut method of slaughter: the animal is killed with a quick cut to the throat using a sharp knife. This allows the blood to drain out and, it is believed, makes the meat cleaner.

Naturally, the image of blood flowing out from the slit throat of a dead cow or sheep doesn’t help. But Muslims, like Jews, insist that so-called ritual slaughter is humane and pain-free because the animal quickly loses consciousness. “There is no time to start feeling any pain,” in the words of Dr Majid Katme, a former spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain.

In contrast, modern western non-ritual methods of slaughter demand that the animal be rendered unconscious before it is killed – usually by means of stunning, with a bolt gun, or electrocution. The stunning of livestock before slaughter has been compulsory in the EU since 1979 but most member states, including the UK, grant exemptions to Muslims and Jews.

So, for the moment, non-stunned halal meat is available in Britain, but contra the Mail on Sunday, there’s not enough of it to satisfy the growing demand. As a Muslim, I often have great difficulty in deciding where to eat out, given the lack of halal restaurants (hence my excitement at Benares). One recent survey suggested nine out of every ten UK Muslims adhere to the strict rules on halal eating – that is, they reluctantly opt for the salmon, and not the steak, when eating out.

Nonetheless, even though they represent just 3 per cent of the population, Britain’s two million Muslims tend to eat much more meat, on average, than their non-Muslim counterparts. Reports suggest that British Muslims consume a fifth of all red meat sold in the UK.

I have British Muslim friends who book their holiday flights on Emirates, whatever their end destination, specifically in order to be able to stop off in transit in Dubai and buy a Big Mac from the airport’s halal McDonald’s. Some Muslims, it seems, will travel to the corners of the earth in pursuit of halal food.

Is it any wonder that the UK halal meat market is estimated to be worth £3bn? Or that fast-food chains in the UK such as McDonald’s and Domino’s Pizza are working on trials offering halal meat?

Nando’s, the Portuguese mid-market restaurant chain, has perhaps gone furthest and fastest. One in five of its branches in the UK now serves halal-certified chicken, and I never cease to be amazed by the sea of hijabs among the diners at the Nando’s in south Harrow that has been my “local” for the past decade.

Then there’s KFC, which has responded to the raft of halal fried-chicken franchises (see Sophie Elmhirst’s piece on page 28) by running a halal trial in a hundred of its restaurants nationwide. On its UK website, KFC promises its customers that “our food is just as tasty and finger lickin’ good as it has always been”. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it also includes a list of defensive answers to “frequently asked questions” such as “Why have you chosen my store?” and “Does this mean your animal welfare standards have changed?”.

Protecting animals is the cover behind which critics of halal meat often hide. This month, Professor Bill Reilly, a past president of the British Veterinary Association, condemned the rise in the number of animals killed in ritual slaughter as “not acceptable”. “[I]f we cannot eliminate non-stunning, we need to keep it to the minimum,” he wrote in the Veterinary Record. “This means restricting the use of halal and kosher meat to those communities that require it for their religious beliefs and, where possible, convincing them of the acceptability of the stunned alternatives.”

Opponents of ritual slaughter cite a raft of scientific studies that condemn the practice as painful and abusive. In a much-discussed report published in 2003, the Farm Animal Welfare Council (FAWC), an independent body that advised the UK government until its dissolution last year, argued that ritual methods of slaughter resulted in “significant pain and distress” for the animal and recommended that Muslims and Jews be banned from slaughtering livestock without stunning the animals first.

The FAWC’s findings were backed by a major EU-funded study “on issues of religious slaughter”, which concluded in 2010: “. . . it can be stated with the utmost probability that animals feel pain during the throat cut without prior stunning”.

Case closed? Not quite. Ruksana Shain, of the Muslim consumer group Behalal.org, says the scientific evidence against halal slaughter “isn’t conclusive”. But she would say that, wouldn’t she? OK. Well, consider the verdict of Joe Regenstein, professor of food science at Cornell University in the United States, who leads the university’s Kosher and Halal Food Initiative.

“Many of those attacking religious slaughter have no clue as to what is happening,” he tells me. “It is more of an Islamophobic issue, not an animal well-being issue.” Compared to modern, secular methods of slaughter, he says, “the traditional or Prophetic method might actually be equal or possibly superior” because the initial pain of the throat cut results “in the animal releasing large quantities of endorphins, putting it in a state of euphoria and numbness”. The cut thus serves as its own stun. The scientific evidence against halal slaughter, Regenstein says, “is extremely weak and has often been done poorly with an agenda driving a desired outcome”.

Missing defence

To pretend that Muslims do not care about animal welfare is unfair. There are several Quranic verses and sayings of the Prophet warning Muslims not to harm livestock; mistreatment of animals is considered a sin by the vast majority of Islamic scholars. In fact, advocates of halal slaughter can call on their own slew of scientific studies for support.

In 1978, research led by Wilhelm Schulze of the University of Veterinary Medicine Hanover showed that “the slaughter in the form of a ritual cut is, if carried out properly, painless in sheep and calves according to EEG [electroencephalography] recordings and the missing defensive actions [of the animals]”. The German Federal Constitutional Court based its 2002 verdict permitting ritual slaughter on this study.

Then there are the writings and research of Temple Grandin, professor of animal sciences at Colorado State University and one of America’s leading experts on the humane treatment and slaughter of livestock. She sees no difference between stunned and non-stunned slaughter if both are conducted properly and professionally. When a ritual slaughter is “done really right”, Grandin has said, “the animal seemed to act like it didn’t even feel it – if I walked up to that animal and put my hand in its face I would have got a much bigger reaction than I observed from the cut, and that was something which really surprised me”.

Remember, the “secular ways of slaughter”, as Regenstein points out, also have their downsides: “If the public were to discover that animals were subject to a pre-slaughter intervention – like having their skull cracked open, [being] electrocuted, or put in a gas chamber – they might not really like that either.” Shouldn’t consumers have a right to know which of these methods were used? Shouldn’t they be told about the danger of “mis-stunning”, which leaves the animal conscious and in pain, and occurs “relatively frequently”, according to a 2004 report by the European Food Safety Authority? Why not label all meat with detailed explanations of how exactly the animal in question was killed, and let consumers decide? “Why only pick on halal?” Ruksana Shain asks.

In the Commons debate on food labelling on 24 April, the Labour MP Gerald Kaufman, who is Jewish, criticised Philip Davies for singling out Muslims and Jews, saying he had “picked on two small minorities who share the way in which the meat they eat is killed”. However, Kaufman added that he would not have expressed his “total opposition to this bill” if it had cast its net wider to include other animals such as chickens that had been kept in “dreadful conditions”.

Preventing animal cruelty goes far beyond the “debate” about stunning or not stunning. And ironically, not all Muslims are opposed to stunning. There are two main organisations that regulate the halal food industry in the UK – the Halal Monitoring Committee, which has a “blanket ruling disallowing stunning in any form”, and the Halal Food Authority, which allows controlled stunning where the “animal or the birds do not die prior to slaughtering”, and which has certified KFC’s stunned chicken as halal.

Thus, most Muslim, and non-Muslim, participants in the heated debate over halal meat are ignoring a critical point. Data produced by the Meat Hygiene Service in 2004 suggested that roughly 90 per cent of halal slaughter in the UK involved stunning. In September 2011, the Food Standards Agency reported that “the majority of animals destined for the halal trade in both the red and white meat sectors are stunned before slaughter”. So what’s all the fuss about?

Consider the scare stories from the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday, which automatically assume that all halal meat derives from the traditional,  non-stunned method of slaughter. What drove both papers’ coverage of the story? Are we seriously expected to believe that either the Mail or the Mail on Sunday gives a damn about animal rights? I struggle to recall the last occasion on which either tabloid splashed on the abuse or neglect of animals. More often than not, Mail columnists reserve rather harsh words (“deranged fanatics”, to quote Richard Littlejohn) for animal rights activists.

Crucially, if the hysteria over halal meat in Britain isn’t the product of Islamophobia, how do halal-obsessed politicians and journalists explain their silence on the subject of kosher meat? The 2003 Farm Animal Welfare Council report condemned both halal and kosher methods of slaughter. Yet, for instance, the Mail on Sunday, despite referring to “ritually slaughtered meat” in the headline of its “Britain goes halal . . .” report, went on to discuss only halal meat for the first 24 paragraphs of the piece before mentioning kosher meat – in passing – in the 25th paragraph.

The truth is that halal has become a proxy for much deeper fears and concerns about the presence of a growing and vocal Muslim population in our midst. “It’s being used as a political issue, especially by xenophobic and Islamophobic folks, to whip up a backlash against ‘the other’,” Regenstein says.

To pretend otherwise is naive, if not disingenuous. If this was a debate about animal welfare, it would be about all forms of slaughter; if it was a debate about ritual slaughter, it would address kosher, and not just halal, meat.

“Why only pick on halal?” It’s an important question in need of an urgent answer.

Related posts:

1. Opinion: Halal Hysteria Leaving aside any references to what Muslims and Jews say...
2. Opinion: Is Islamic slaughter cruel and inhumane or is it profit above Principle? When the writer of this article applied to be shown...
3. Opinion: Uncommon alliances: Muslim and Jew, left and right In October, the Dutch Senate will consider the ban on...
4. Opinion: Is machine slaughter Halal? A survey carried out by Islamic Scholars here in the...
5. Halal food market is estimated at US$500 billion per year An overview on Halal in France, Russia, USA, UK and...

Saudi Arabia halted imports of U.S. beef, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service.

Beef from the U.S. shipped on or after April 19 is not eligible for export to the country, the agency said today in a report on its website, without providing a reason for the ban.

The U.S. shipped 15.469 million pounds (7,017 metric tons) of beef to Saudi Arabia in 2011, government data show. That’s less than 1 percent of total U.S. beef exports last year.

To contact the reporter on this story: Elizabeth Campbell in Chicago atecampbell14@bloomberg.net

Related posts:

1. Canada and Saudi Arabia Agree to Reopen Beef Market RIYADH, Saudi Arabia, February 17, 2009 – Canadian beef exporters...
2. Saudi Arabia: Saudi delegation seeks food products from Pakistan The Saudi delegation's plan is also to visit the meat...
3. Horn of Africa to double livestock exports to Saudi Arabia Livestock traders in Somaliland welcomed the latest development in Saudi...
4. Saudi Arabia: Need for halal standards for food additives underlined Mian Nadeem Riaz from Texas said that for the food...
5. Saudi Arabia to Cultivate Two Million Acres in Sudan Chairman of Jeddah Chamber of Commerce, Sheikh Saleh Kamel revealed...

Indonesia has become the first country to suspend US beef imports, following the discovery in California this week of a dairy cow infected with mad cow disease.

Indonesia has become the first country to suspend US beef imports, following the discovery in California this week of a dairy cow infected with mad cow disease.

According to Agence France-Presse, imports of boned US meat and innards would be banned, however the import of boneless meat remained unaffected.

“We will lift the ban as soon as the U.S. can assure us its dairy cows are free of mad cow disease,” the Associated Press quotedIndonesia’s Vice Agriculture Minister Rusman Heriawan as saying.

“It could be one month or one year. It depends on how long it takes to resolve this case.”

US Health authorities have said the diseased animal was never a threat to the nation’s food supply, in the first case of mad cow disease in the US since 2006.

Major buyers of US beef have said they will continue with American beef imports, meaning Indonesia’s partial ban will have little impact, according to Reuters.

There were no immediate signs that some of the biggest consumers, South Korea and Japan, would follow suit.

The EU has said that it has no plans to impose restrictions on imports of US beef products, according to AFP.

In 2011, the United States exported nearly 18,000 tones of beef products to Indonesia, valued at $28.2 million, according to AFP, citing figures from the US Meat Export Federation.

Indonesia imports most of its meat from Australia and New Zealand.

The US trade representative Ron Kirk said Thursday that there was “no reason to fear” that a Californian mad cow case had tainted food markets.

“There’s been no evidence (in) this one reported instance that any contaminated product has entered our food chain or any international food chain,” Kirk said.

“There is no reason, from my understanding of the analysis… for any consumer to be concerned about the consumption of US beef.

“Thus we would expect that Indonesia would quickly reopen its market for its consumers for US beef products.”

Related posts:

1. Indonesia says eyeing beef imports from Brazil Indonesia is considering permitting imports of beef products from Brazil...
2. Indonesia bans New Zealand beef imports Indonesia has temporarily banned imports of beef products from New...
3. Indonesia Lifts Ban on New Zealand Beef Imports, Group Says Indonesia, Asia’s third-most populous country, lifted a ban on imports...
4. Indonesia to lift import ban on U.S. beef Indonesian government will lift the import ban on U.S. beef...
5. Indonesia lifts ban on New Zealand beef exports, says minister Indonesia has lifted a week-old ban on imported beef from...