Complaining that new US procedures to deal with mad cow disease were not good enough, Japan said on Tuesday it would send a team to rival beef exporter Australia to look for alternative supplies.
Japanese Agriculture Minister Yoshiyuki Kamei told reporters the new measures, announced last week, fell short of what was needed to reassure Japan, the biggest buyer of US beef, over the safety of US meat.
"The safeguards are not up to the level of those (in Japan)," he said, adding he wants the United States to conduct the same type of tests on meat as Japan does.
Japan suspended US beef imports, which amounted to some 234,000 tonnes worth $1.12 billion in 2002, immediately after the December 23 announcement of the first US case of the brain-wasting illness BSE, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy.
A rare human form of BSE, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD), can result from eating animal products contaminated with the disorder. It has been linked to around 130 human deaths, mostly in Britain, where BSE devastated the cattle industry in the 1990s.
The US measures include a ban on the use of sick or crippled "downer" cattle for human food, but the country does not test all cattle used for consumption, as Japan does, and has so far responded coolly to the idea.
A Japanese government source told Reuters on Monday that a Japanese technical team was planning to go to the United States this week to review US safety measures.
Piling more pressure on the United States, Japanese agriculture officials were due to arrive in Australia on Thursday to meet cattle farmers before heading to New Zealand, a Japanese Embassy spokesman in Sydney said on Tuesday.