Issues in Depth: U.S. Beef Imports, Part One
September 6, 2008 | Opinion, Special |
Okay, the Korean People have been demonstrating almost non-stop for the last four months… all because the government decided to import American beef, if you believe what your local news tells you. According to what you may have heard, Koreans are scared — almost to the degree of hysteria — that American beef could be infected with mad-cow disease. Koreans think they’re all going to die if they eat so much as a chopstickful of American beef. Or so the story goes.
And most of these “stories” get seriously oversimplified by the time they reach the printed (or broadcasted) media, not to mention the International section of a magazine on the other side of the world. The result? We get painted as a mindless mob, driven by insane fear. Our struggles become known as just another of those so many crazy things that happen in the world every day, somewhat amusing but barely understandable. “The Prince of Zaraquaqua attempted a coup this morning, but he was shot on his way to the bathroom…” Seriously, who cares.
But the important thing, as always, is why. Human beings don’t normally participate in anti-government rallies en masse, so there’s got to be a reason why this is happening in Korea. Why did a relatively minor issue, such as U.S. beef imports, trigger a massive series of anti-government protests in Korea? Is beef a sacred topic in Korea? (No, very few of us are Hindu.) Did anyone choke to death while eating a Big Mac? (Not that I can remember.) Is this just another episode of rampant anti-Americanism? (That could have been true 6 years ago, but less likely so now.) Or does the issue have more to do with our own government than with the U.S.?
Above: Inspected carcasses in a U.S. slaughterhouse. Source: Wikipedia.
Let’s go back a few months. On June 1 of this year, in my very first post, I described the issue of U.S. beef imports as that of (1) risk management and (2) public accountability — though I didn’t use those exact phrases. I don’t have much to add to that article, but let me repeat some of the things I said there, so that we all know how it began. So here comes the “background information”.
The first American case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE; a.k.a. mad-cow disease) was discovered in 2003. (Sorry, I’m not going to introduce that disease for you. Please do your own research; Wikipedia is your friend.) Since then, except during brief periods, the Republic of Korea had banned the import of U.S. beef. That was a perfectly sensible decision; who wants to buy beef from a country that can’t control a deadly bovine disease, especially when scientists believe that eating beef tainted with BSE can cause vCJD, a deadly human disease? Dozens of other countries banned the import of U.S. beef around the same time, only to loosen the prohibition gradually and cautiously. But the U.S. claimed to have sorted out the issue; and since 2006, the U.S. government has been trying very hard to get Korea (as well as other countries) to open up its market again. The U.S. government, of course, was under enormous pressure from its beef industry, which expected a revenue of at least $1 billion a year from beef sales in Korea. (In 2003, we purchased $850 million of U.S. beef, making us the world’s third largest importer of U.S. beef.)
However, until April 18, 2008, the possibility of reaching a trade agreement seemed all but illusive. In the summer and fall of 2007, the Korean government had permitted a small amount of U.S. beef to be imported; but American exporters had failed to meet the “no bones” condition, so the experimental permission was promptly revoked. After our change of government in February, the U.S. renewed its attempts to make us buy their beef. But we insisted on a few conditions, such as (1) a ban on the trade of any beef produced from cattle over 30 months of age (which are thought to carry a higher risk of BSE than younger cattle), and (2) the removal of all specified risk materials (such as the brain, spinal cord, and certain internal organs). The U.S. argued, on behalf of its beef industry, that such conditions were not acceptable, despite the fact that nearly 100 other countries including Japan and the EU have similar regulations in place. So the negotiations stalled — until April 18.
Lee Myung-Bak, the 66-year-old former businessman who became our President earlier this year, had his first meeting with U.S. President George W. Bush on April 19 in Camp David. The night before Lee’s helicopter ride, the Korean government dropped all of the aforementioned conditions, and imformed the U.S. Trade Representative that Korea would import all U.S. beef regardless of age or part. Of course, a short list of prohibited parts were attached, which American exporters apparently didn’t mind; but in any case, those minor conditions must have been considered insignificant by both parties. Without further ado, an agreement was signed. The next day, Lee and Bush were seen happily riding a golf cart together.
As you might expect, Korean consumers were taken by a total surprise. Less than 24 hours ago, our government and most of our news agencies had been telling us that the aforementioned conditions were strictly necessary in order to ensure the safety of our food. But now, less than 24 hours later, the same government was telling us that such conditions were completely unnecessary. And as far as we could tell, no scientist had made a new discovery, during those 24 hours, about the risk of BSE (or lack thereof) in the United States.
Even more confusing, some agencies within the government continued to say that some of the beef that were now permitted were dangerous to consume. (According to this news report, which is in Korean.) Who were we supposed to believe? As you might imagine, it was not at all unreasonable for us to suspect that our government’s sudden change of attitude was nothing more than Lee’s gift to Bush. And of course, an annual revenue of $1 billion is not a small gift at all. For your reference, trade between Korea and the U.S. currently amounts to approximately $80 billion a year. Beef would have represented more than 1% of it.
Above: A candlelight demonstration in May, where tens of thousands of citizens participated. The number of protesters eventually grew to nearly one million in mid-June. Since then, our number has declined steadily, due to violent suppression, negative publicity by the pro-government media, internal strife, the arrest of our leaders, and of course, pure exhaustion.
And the rest of the story is just as I described in my first post as well as all the posts that followed. Worried about food safety, concerned about the fact that a policy on such an important issue was reversed without any explanation, and angry that such a reversal was made for no apparent reason other than that the President wanted his meeting with Bush to be more pleasurable, hundreds of thousands of Korean citizens flooded the streets in protest.
At first, the government didn’t bother to respond at all, as if the officials simply couldn’t understand what the problem was. Then the government attempted to impose its position upon everyone, as will be discussed in more detail in Part Three. When we told the government to stop fooling us and do some real work, the latter responded with a violent crackdown upon us. When we didn’t stop protesting, the government managed to get American exporters to temporarily suspend exporting beef over 30 months of age and certain specified risk materials, as I reported in an earlier post. But then again, when we proved ourselves intelligent enough to see through this shallow trick, the government renewed its efforts in beating us up and arresting our leaders.
And now our government and the few who support it (about 25% according to a recent poll) are calling us criminals, traitors, liars, communists, and North Korean sympathizers. All of this, while U.S. beef is being imported and distributed freely and we have no way to reliably decide if any particular product contains U.S. beef. (See this post for a reason why it’s impossible for us to avoid or boycott U.S. beef even if we wanted to. The government is having a hard time getting merchants to properly label the origin of beef products.)
Above: Victims of police violence in late May and early June. For more records of brutality, please refer to “Democracy is Now Officially Dead in Korea” (June 29), “The Horror!” (June 29), “2MB’s Happy Day” (August 16), and “More Pictures” (August 23). You might also want to watch this YouTube video as well as other video clips that show up as related to that one.
There are several aspects to the ongoing controversy, including (obviously) the scientific facts about the safety (or lack thereof) of U.S. beef (or certain parts of it), the role played by the local media in bringing such information to the attention of the general public, and the way in which our government has handled these issues. The last point was the focus of my earlier post, summarized in the paragraph above.
This time, however, I would like to talk about the issue of U.S. beef imports from an angle that might seem slightly off-topic. That angle can be summarized in one word: trust. Or to be more precise, lack of trust.
No sane citizen trusts all of his or her politicians. But as a whole, citizens of a modern state tend to take their government’s word when the latter tells them that such-and-such is the case. However, in the months immediately preceding and during the early stage of the U.S. beef controversy, Lee Myung-Bak’s government had already lost that trust to a critical degree. As a result, no matter how hard the Korean government tried to convince its People (that is, us) that we should trust President Lee and his team of “experts” to work things out at the end of the day, few of us could trust them anymore. We had no choice but to take matters into our own hands. So we’ve been protesting, calling for change. In fact, we’ve been doing more than just protesting; I’ll take another opportunity in the near future to introduce you to some of the other things that ordinary Korean citizens have been doing to secure their sovereign rights in these difficult times.
To give a quick summary of what is to come in Parts Two and Three, my view is that the U.S. beef controversy in Korea actually has very little to do with U.S. beef. Therefore, all those headlines that say “Koreans still protesting against U.S. beef”, etc, actually say very little about the reality of our situation. Rather, I think there already was a critical mass of distrust and discontent between the Korean People and our government, waiting to explode at any moment.
In other words, the unexpected beef deal of April 18 only served as a trigger. Indeed, it was a very appropriate trigger. The way in which the issue of U.S. beef unfolded is representative of the way in which our government lost its People’s trust in several other issues as well. Let me put it, tentatively, as consisting of six stages:
(1) The government serves a very specific interest, or at least appears to do so;
(2) The government pretends to be serving everyone’s interests;
(3) The pretense, which was rather transparent to begin with, is uncovered;
(4) Dissent and opposition develops among the general public, leading to a messy state of affairs;
(5) The government blames a particular party for the mess, and that party gets persecuted; and
(6) Pretending as if there is no dissent any longer, the government carries on what it had been doing.
Okay, so much for now. More will follow in the posts to follow. (1) - (3) will be covered in Part Two; (4) is already well known; (5) will be the topic of my future article on PD Notebook; and the phenomenon described in (6) will have to wait a bit longer to manifest itself.
In the meantime, many of the things that I want to say in Part Two were already discussed by Jay Kim in his magnificent video. Please do watch that video; it’s worth your 25 minutes, although I won’t agree with Jay on every issue.
Disclaimer: That’s right, this series is going consist of more opinion than news. I’ve been trying not to talk too much about my own views, other than what is obvious from the fact that I’m running a blog like this. But this time I’m trying not only to report but also to analyze what’s going on, so I suppose I have no other choice. I’ll do my best not to get too biased, but please don’t take my word and feel free to consult other opinions if you’re really interested. The problem, of course, is that reliable sources in English are hard to come by…