BIG MAC ID#452458525444,  MAD COW DISEASE & FOOD LINEAGE
KEY WORD: MAD COW DISEASE, FRAUD, CRIMINAL LAW

It is a bit of a stretch to include Big Macs, as the law does not apply to imported meat and most fast food restaurants do use mostly imported beef. But starting December, 2004 every single peace of Japanese beef sold in tens of thousands of  markets or  restaurants will have ten digit id numbers assigned. Those numbers can be checked out on a website where its history can be traced from rearing to slaughter to retail. The ID numbers of each cow is given out by the National Livestock Breeding Center.

This extreme registration of every piece of meat was in response to the mad cow disease which was found in Japan in 2001. This system is thought likely to place a complete control system in place. By 2004, thirteen mad cow cases had been found in Japan.

Another measure was to kill all the suspected infected cows and compensate the meat producers. Unfortunately this turned out to be the “Perfect Scam.” Apparently authorities failed to make any checks and meat dealers and processors just imported cheap foreign meat, labeled it as infected Japanese meat and collected the much higher compensation. They took in billions of yen. One senior manager of a meat processor was given an 18 month suspended sentence and fined 300,000 yen for mislabeling 250,000 packages of US beef. Even the famous, or rather more infamous, Snow Brand Foods was found to have used the same strategy to obtain 200 million yen for such fraudulent transactions. The Fukuchiku Corp., a major meat wholesaler used the same switch and bait strategy to defraud the government of 2.5 billion yen from late 2001 into 2003. The chairman and six other officials were arrested in November 2004. The former chairman of Hannan Corp., an Osaka meat packing company obtained over 5 billion yen in such compensation from late 2001 to 2002, which was about a quarter of the 21 billion yen total that the government eventually paid out under the program. From the above cases alone, one can see that more than a third of the total program payments were made for fraudulent clains.

Shortly after the mad cow was found in the USA, the Japanese government banned such imports and the Ministry of Agriculture sent out 2000 inspectors to verify that retailers had origin labels on all the beef sold in their stores, One supermarket manager and one of his workers was arrested for labeling US beef as Japanese.

Amazingly, even vegetables will have their own ID numbers by the spring of  2005. The ID numbers will be printed on the package label, and then using that ID number, the consumer can go to a government website and find chemicals and fertilizers used, frequency of use, and harvest date and location.

Copyright 2005. All rights reserved Attorney Roderick H. Seeman

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