Japan will revise a food law to make it compulsory that all imported beef is certified as being free of mad cow disease, officials of the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry said Thursday.
The measure will effectively freeze European beef out of the Japanese market, they said.
Satoshi Takaya, chief of the ministry's Inspection and Safety Division, said: "It is hard to confirm the safety of European beef. Customs would not allow it in even if certificates were attached to it."
The revision to the Food Sanitation Law would cover imports of beef and of cow and bull organs or bones. It would also provide a further countermeasure to the spread of the human variant of the fatal disease, the ministry officials said.
The Agriculture Ministry in December told food and trading companies to refrain from importing these products from the European Union, Switzerland and Liechtenstein.
The former Health and Welfare Ministry had earlier recommended that businesses stop using products derived from cows and bulls in the manufacture of medical and cosmetic products.
The officials also said the Health Ministry plans to impose stricter guidelines to screen blood donors who have lived in Britain and other European countries.
Mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, is suspected of causing the variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. , the fatal human equivalent of mad cow disease. Some 80 Europeans have died of variant CJD since the mid-1990s, causing beef sales to plummet in Europe.