AR-News: Beef group opposes operator's plan for 100% testing

[jim robertson]

http://www.tribnet.com/news/local/story/4985631p-4913872c.html

Beef group opposes operator's plan for 100% testing
ROXANA HEGEMAN; The Associated Press

WICHITA, KAN. - If government regulators allow Creekstone Farms Premium Beef 
to test all its cattle for mad cow disease, it would start a "domino effect" 
resulting in other countries and domestic consumers insisting on 100 percent 
testing, a competitor said Monday.

Steve Hunt, chief executive officer of Kansas City-based U.S. Premium Beef, 
said the cost to the industry would be nearly $1 billion a year - a cost the 
industry cannot expect consumers to cover.


Hunt, who heads the nation's fourth-largest meatpacking plant, told 
reporters during a news conference hosted by the National Cattlemen's Beef 
Association that food safety is not a free- enterprise matter.


"This is not an issue of big versus small. Let us be clear, the long-term 
costly effects of this issue ... will be borne by the smallest of us all, 
the farmers and ranchers of this great country," Hunt said.


With many other cattle and farm industry groups lining up to support 
Creekstone Farms, the beef association put together a hastily called 
telephone news conference Monday to reaffirm its opposition to private 
testing. Hunt took no questions after his statement.


Creekstone Farms chief executive John Stewart - who called into the 
teleconference while reporters questioned other participants - was abruptly 
cut off by the beef association when he tried to make a statement in support 
of his company's position.


"We do strongly believe in what we are doing," Stewart said. "We think our 
direction is right."


Bill Fielding, Creekstone's chief operating officer, told The Associated 
Press that Hunt was wrong.


"It is hard to understand how a little company with less than 1 percent of 
the industry capacity is going to force the big packers into anything," 
Fielding said. "It seems just the opposite."


(Published 1:55AM, April 20th, 2004)

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