Issues in Depth: U.S. Beef Imports, Part Three   2008-09-25 19:11

As I reported in Part One, the Korean government has been under constant pressure from U.S. beef producers to open up the domestic market as much as possible. Until April 18, we had successfully warded off their excessive demands, choosing instead to import only those parts which scientists believe are less likely to carry BSE-causing prions. Then the government suddenly dropped all of those regulations.

As we've seen, the Korean People were very concerned about this unexpected change of policy. Opposition began to grow, and on May 2, as I described in Part Two, candlelight protests began. Then, shortly afterwards, the following advertisements appeared on the first page of every daily newspaper:

350 million cows were slaughtered in the U.S. in the last decade, but there was no BSE! The beef we're about to import is enjoyed by 300 million Americans, 2.5 million Korean-Americans, and people from 96 countries. No cow born in the U.S. after 1997 has ever been diagnosed with BSE. As well, we will properly quarantine all imported beef. BSE cannot and will not enter Korea. Your government will take care of your health! (The Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, Fisheries, and Food & The Ministry of Health, Welfare, and Family Affairs)

We're importing the same beef as what American citizens eat! The beef we're about to import is enjoyed by 300 million Americans... (The rest is the same as above.)

So... this is how the Korean government "responded" to the People's concern that the virtually unconditional opening of the domestic market to U.S. beef would allow beef tainted with BSE to cross the border. All except two or three of the 96 countries mentioned above have more stringent regulations than what the Korean government announced on April 18; and yet, the government was proud of it!

The ads were just the beginning. The government even printed and distributed cartoons where the main characters claim that U.S. beef is absolutely safe, and that any allegation to the contrary is baseless.

And there's even more than newspaper ads and silly cartoons. Video clips were made, too. And according to an official report that was released at a later date, the publication and distribution of these ads, cartoons, and video clips cost the government over $4.5 million. That's $4.5 million of taxpayers' money spent on advertising a particular product from a particular country!

Imagine seeing the following ad on the first page of every American daily newspaper. How would you react upon learning that your government is spending millions of dollars of your bloody tax to make a particular product more palatable to you -- and in particular, to encourage you to purchase imported goods? (The following fake ad probably states the truth, but in circumstances such as the one described just now, would you even care whether the ad told the true or not?)

Imagine the U.S. government advertising for Toyota...

Now, even more important than the waste of tax money is the commonsense principle that a government is supposed to remain neutral between different products on the market, as long as no particular product poses a threat to public health and/or security. It's the job of manufacturers/producers to convince consumers to buy their merchandise. That's a very elementary principle which forms the backbone of any capitalist democracy!

When such a simple and simple principle gets broken -- and even more, when the government acts as if it's proud of having broken it -- one is obliged to ask what kind of connection there could be between the government and the manufacturer/producer in question. Something must be going on behind the scenes. This is where we really need to be suspicious of a conspiracy, or at the very least, a deliberately arranged convergence of interest. (Yeah, I said in Part Two that I don't like conspiracy theories. Give me a more reasonable explanation for the above, and I'll gladly take it. But for now, it seems that some sort of convergence of interest is the most likely explanation for what's happening!)

Well, we know that the President of the U.S. National Cattlemen's Beef Association was invited to President Lee's inauguration ceremony in February. What's that cowboy doing halfway across the world from his ranch?

We also know that Lee wants the Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement to be put into effect as soon as possible, even if it means sacrificing public health. Lee himself said that on June 19, but we didn't need him to say so; we knew it from the beginning.

Lee seems to believe that the FTA will help "normalize" Korea's relationship with the U.S., which he (and many of his supporters) thinks had gone sour during the left-wing rule from Feb. 1998 to Feb. 2008. Being a hardcore conservative, Lee thinks he absolutely must fix this "socialist problem".

But the FTA requires Korea to irreversibly privatize a number of public corporations. And as Jay Kim says in his magnificent video -- and as I noted in Part Two -- Lee's relatives and associates are drooling over those privatizations.

And we all know that both ideological commitment and expectation of profit are excellent motivations for people who have money and/or power to do something wrong.

Well, in fact, there's a name for this kind of politics: interest group politics. We're all familiar with it. Things are even messier in the U.S., where everyone from Esso to NRA to Greenpeace try to make Congress pass certain laws. As citizens of modern capitalist democracies, we've all given up -- at least to some degree -- hope of ever getting rid of this intimate relationship, between government on the one hand, and business and ideology on the other hand. Perhaps this kind of relationship is even necessary for modern societies to function properly. But of course, even if we can live with it, there's got to be a line that should not be crossed. By early May when the ads shown above first appeared in daily newspapers, we'd had enough of Lee's unabashed official support for those whom he liked.

What was even more, the information on the ads was clearly misleading!

A few days after the government's ads appeared, members of an Internet community called SoulDresser pooled money to run similar-looking ads on a couple of left-wing newspapers. In a clever parody of the original ads, the first ad read:

We're not importing the same beef as what American citizens eat! The beef we're about to import is shunned by 300 million Americans, 2.5 million Korean-Americans, and people from 96 countries. (1) Even USDA Standard, the lowest grade of beef that an ordinary consumer will buy in the U.S., must be from cows less than 30 months old. (2) American consumers are well aware of the dangers involved in Advanced Meat Recovery, and even OIE recommends against its trade. (3) Beef tainted with BSE cannot be sanitized; and theoretically, 0.001g of it can kill you. Renegotiate the beef deal!

The graph on the left compares Japan's policy on U.S. beef (green: only allow cattle less than 20 months of age); the Korean government's previous policy (blue: less than 30 months of age, no bones or intestines); and the current administration's policy (red: allow pretty much everything). In early May when this ad appeared, even skulls and brains were allowed; later, in mid-June, American exporters agreed to suspend trading such parts "until there is market demand in Korea".

Another ad from SoulDresser followed:

Put public health first! Renegotiate the beef deal! The government and the media are being even less trustworthy than U.S. beef producers... You say you'll stop importing U.S. beef if BSE is found in the U.S., but it will be too late then. Implement proper regulations now... Stop spending tax money in an attempt to convince the People of falsity... We want regulations like what Japan has in place... What about scientific evidence that was published in 2007 in none other than pro-government newspapers? etc. etc.

What scientific evidence? Well, look what some of our nation's "most trustworthy" newspapers used to say regarding the danger of BSE (or lack thereof):

Chosun Ilbo, April 22, 2002, p. 1. "Koreans are believed to be at a higher risk of contracting BSE, because our traditional recipes sometimes call for cattle brain, spinal cord, intestines, liver, and even raw beef... Also, studies show that our genetic makeup might make us even more vulnerable to nvCJD (new variant CJD, caused by beef infected with BSE)..."

For your information, Chosun Ilbo changed its position immediately after April 18 of this year. Now it claims -- in accordance with the government's official position -- that the BSE scare is totally unfounded. In particular, both the government and Chosun Ilbo now insist that the concern about our genetic makeup is absolutely ridiculous. Well, did science change since 2002? Let's look at a more recent article from another well-respected national newspaper, Dong-A Ilbo:

Dong-A Ilbo, March 23, 2007, p. 24. Left: "According to an article published in the October 2005 issue of Neurogenetics, every single victim of CJD were found to have the methionine-methionine combination as their 129th amino acid. Among Britons and Americans, around 40% have such a genetic makeup; but the ratio is much higher among Koreans..." (This last clause is not visible in the excerpt.) Right: "Even if you remove SRM, infectious prions can be found anywhere else in the carcass of an infected animal... A tiny amount present in cosmetics made with beef extract can cause disease after a long time... The immune system multiplies the prions so that they spread throughout the body."

Hmm, at least according to what our national papers used to say, BSE is a very scary disease!

There's a reason why I'm quoting Korean newspapers rinstead of scientific journals.

First, newspaper stories represent what the average citizen is expected to know about some scientific issue; and therefore, the excerpts above demonstrate that the average Korean, by April 2008, had a good reason to suspect that the danger of BSE was real. Simply and suddenly negating that bit of information -- without any reference to sources at least as credible as the ones cited in previous stories -- wouldn't have helped at all to alleviate this concern.

Second, the fact that both Chosun Ilbo and Dong-A Ilbo now discredit almost everything they said about BSE in the past is a perfect example of the very close relationship between government and the media in South Korea. Many of our major newspapers will only report what the government likes them to report, and the same is becoming increasingly true of both the TV and the Internet. So much for freedom and democracy.

Oh, yes, and Korea Food and Drug Administration -- by far the most reliable agency when it comes to questions of food safety -- kept recommending, as late as June 27, against the use of American cattle spines and intestines in drugs and cosmetics. (See this news report, in Korean.) Real scientists hadn't changed their mind, after all.

What does this all mean? The April 18 "change of policy" had no scientific basis at all. It was all about politics and economics, made without any regard to expert advice. The Korean government was lying, indeed, when it said that there was absolutely no danger of BSE.

Oh, and the part of the government's ad where it says that there was no BSE among the 350 million cows slaughtered in the U.S. in the last decade is simply false. There have been three cases since 2003, and that's the reason why Korea stopped importing U.S. beef in the first place! In addition, American cattle farmers used to import a large number of cows from Canada every year, where there have been 13 cases. There's a very good reason why dozens of other countries, including our neighbor Japan, closely monitor and regulate the import of U.S. beef -- and beef from other places, as well.

Of course, as I said above, there's nothing new about politicians lying. As we all know, they lie and change their words all the time, for their own interest and for that of their supporters. Most of us, as a result, have a certain degree of reservation when taking a politician's word. But as you can see from the examples above, around the time that the U.S. beef controversy arose in Korea, the lies and pretenses of our leaders were getting rather too transparent for the People to put up with.

So perhaps that's why our teengers, naturally much less patient than the rest of us, revolted first. No matter how lazy, selfish, or undereducated they might be -- for that matter, I don't think any of us "grown-ups" are much better than them -- they had this one magnificent quality: they hadn't just given up, like so many of the rest of us. The books they read -- and they're supposed to read so much -- told them that the Republic of Korea was a democracy; but every day around them -- and around us, too -- things were deteriorating at an alarming rate. Who would want to enter a society such as ours? Better fix it first, according to what little we know about how it's supposed to be. As this picket, displayed by one of the teenagers, says:

"I'm just doing what the textbooks told me to do!"

Oh yes, the government noticed what was happening, and it now says that the textbooks need to be replaced, "because they were written by socialists." Seriously, if it is "socialist" to say that citizens of a democratic country have the right to demonstrate against policies they abhor, I'd rather be a "socialist." In the mouth of a greedy politician, such labels are empty names anyway.

Finally, here's my favorite excerpt from Dong-A Ilbo:

Chosun Ilbo, December 29, 2003, p. 3. "We need to be able to trust the government. Even if beef is 99.99% safe, the government must ensure that the other 0.01% is being properly taken care of..."

Exactly what Lee Myung-Bak's government has no intention of carrying out!

The next article in the "Issues in Depth" series will be about PD Notebook (or PD Diary), a TV program aired on April 29 that greatly raised awareness of BSE among the general public. The broadcasting station, MBC, paid dearly for airing the program; and producers of PD Notebook were demoted after MBC was forced to apologize for "misleading the public". A lot of people believe that the government is blaming everything on PD Notebook, when the government itself is at least as much at fault.

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