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By Raymond Colitt

BRASILIA, Jan 14 (Reuters) - Brazil agreed to comply with a Jan. 31 deadline for tougher regulations on beef shipments to the European Union and backed down from a possible legal challenge, the country's agriculture minister said on Monday.

"The position I adopted as minister is to meet the European demands, correcting everything that had been done wrong in recent years," Reinhold Stephanes told Reuters in an interview in the capital Brasilia.

The EU announced last month that beef from Brazil may be shipped to the EU after Jan. 31 only from an approved and restricted list of producers that meet strict EU import requirements.

The Brazilian government no longer considered challenging the EU measures before the World Trade Organization as it had threatened to do in December, Stephanes said.

"Europe is our biggest client. It's good to have a highly demanding client, who forces us to adopt high standards," the minister said.

Brazil is the world's largest exporter of beef with estimated foreign sales of $4.2 billion in 2007. The government will present by the end of the month a list of over 1,000 producers, or roughly 10 percent of cattle ranchers, it considers apt to export to the EU, Stephanes said.

Those producers will subsequently be inspected by EU officials.

The requirements include holding animals in EU approved territories free of foot-and-mouth disease for at least 90 days and keeping cattle at the designated ranches for at least 40 days prior to slaughter.

The EU measures followed intense lobbying by European, particularly Irish, cattle ranchers to ban Brazilian beef imports, which have grown sharply in recent years.

EU experts, who traveled to Brazil in November to investigate complaints by European farmers and members of the European Parliament, found what the EU commission called "serious and repeated deficiencies in Brazil's animal health and traceability systems."

(Reporting by Raymond Colitt; editing Reese Ewing and Jackie Frank)

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