Beef Import Still Continues

“Where is the role of the Agriculture Quarantine Agency if beef and cattle offal from countries still infected by Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD) and Mad Cow/Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) is still imported into Indonesia? There is even beef and offal coming in from Singapore,” he said.
Member of the Veterinary Medicine Observation Institute, Soehadji, said there are 3 main groups of infectious animal disease, the very hazardous, the hazardous, and the least hazardous.
FMD and BSE are in the very hazardous disease group. Cattle affected by FMD suffer production loss and the effects are severe for farmers. It took Indonesia 100 years to free itself from FMD. While mad cow disease has an incubation period of 20 years.
Referring to data from the Central Statistical Agency, beef and cattle offal import for January to September 2010 reached 104,000 tons or 30,000 tons over the quota stated in the 2014 Beef Self-Sufficiency Blue Print, which is 73,000 tons.
Besides from Australia and New Zealand, beef and offal were also imported from South Korea (20 kilograms), the United States of America (8,330.6 tons), Canada (1,541.7 tons), Singapore (1,611 tons), and Ukraine (24.5 tons).
Soehadji said that South Korea is a FMD infected country. The country’s leader has even received a vote of no confidence from its people because of covered up FMD cases.
Canada had experienced BSE cases, while Singapore is not even a beef and cattle offal producing country. Products from Singapore are suspected to be repackaged products which might come from FMD or BSE infected countries.

Zoning system
Soehadji said that beef and offal import from Singapore should not have happened if there was strict control. Indonesia has had an agreement among ASEAN countries to control that.
Mangku Sitepu, a veterinarian, asked the government to be more stringent in controlling beef and cattle offal import because the commodity is widely consumed by the Indonesian people.
Mangku said that beef and offal import from countries with zoning systems should have been stopped since August 27, 2010, or after the Constitution Court issued a verdict for the Animal Husbandry and Health Act.
Soehadji said that in relations with the ever increasing volume of beef and cattle offal import, the government should have an accurate data base for calculating the beef balance, all in respect of the population, consumption, and import.
Currently the figures used in the 2014 Beef Self-Sufficiency Blue Print are of unclear reference. “They need an accurate data source because all policies are based on that,” he said.
Indonesia had conducted an animal inventory survey in 1961 and since then has never done it again. Plans are a survey will be conducted in 2011. “There are many biases in the blue print developed by the Ministry of Agriculture for beef self-sufficiency in 2014, this is because it was made from inaccurate figures,” he said. (MAS)

Source : Kompas