Brazil Ranchers, Ports Boycott Canadian Imports

The Brazilian beef industry and port workers are boycotting Canadian imports in a deepening dispute over Ottawa’s decision to ban Brazilian beef on concerns about “mad cow” disease, cattle ranchers said Tuesday.

The Brazilian Rural Society, representing hundreds of thousands of small farmers including 70,000 cattle ranchers, said it was suspending imports of potassium chloride, used in fertilizers and one of Canada’s chief exports to Brazil.

“There was a national concern and revolt against the Canadian action, which has surprised and delighted me,” said the society’s president Luiz Suplicy Hafers, cattle rancher and also owner of various coffee plantations.

“I think it was a slander,” Hafers told Reuters, referring to the Canadian ban on Brazilian beef products. “Can you imagine if we went to France and said that their wine might have some kind of toxin?”

Mad cow disease, formally known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE, has been linked to more than 80 deaths in humans, but has never been reported in the United States or Brazil.

Brazil, which says not one case of mad cow disease has ever been discovered in the country, insists the ban was prompted by the two countries’ long-standing dispute over subsidies to aircraft makers.

Stevedores at Brazil’s key port of Santos, the largest in South America, planned to suspend unloading all Canadian goods starting Thursday, Hafers said.

The move came as Canadian health inspectors were set to begin work in Brazil to evaluate the risks of mad cow disease being present in the country’s cattle--which at some 160 million head represents the world’s largest commercial herd.

The inspectors are expected to begin their work in Brazil today and remain there for five to six days, reassessing Canada’s ban on Brazilian beef early next week.

Canada announced Feb. 3 its decision to ban Brazilian beef products over mad cow concerns, saying Brazil had repeatedly failed to provide requested data on its herd.

Ottawa, which pulled in fellow members of the North American Free Trade Assn.--Mexico and the United States--has said it would remove the ban if food inspectors found there was no mad cow risk.