Beef and Ratification

Donald Kirk provides a useful overview of the turn the trade agreement debate has recently taken in Korea, where opponents of the trade agreement have been fanning public fears about the safety of U.S. beef (although he doesn't get into the assertions that Korean's are unusually susceptible to mad-cow disease): South Korean beef overcooked (Asia Times Online)

The beef agreement makes the perfect tool for activists who oppose the free trade agreement (FTA) laboriously hammered out in one-and-a-half years of negotiations. Foes of the agreement see demonstrations against the beef deal as a device for persuading South Korea's National Assembly to delay ratifying the FTA - or to vote against it when it comes up for decision.

Opposition to the FTA reflects the longstanding alliance between farmers, concerned that the agreement will jeopardize their incomes, and leftists who see it as an easy pretext for pillorying the US-Korean relationship....

The beef issue appeared to have been on its way to settlement more than a year ago when Seoul agreed on the import of bone-free beef. X-rays, however, revealed bone chips lodged in the first few shipments, which were sent back to the US.

Under the agreement, reached in the hours before Lee met Bush at Camp David last month, the US may send T-bones and ribs, boned staples of the beef diet of Koreans. The agreement also permits the import of beef from cows that were more than 30 months old at the time they were slaughtered, a category that was previously banned.

The activists may be sure that a breakdown in the US-Korean beef deal will mean the end of the FTA. The FTA will be a hard sell in an American election year in which the leading Democratic Party candidates, Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, have said they will vote against the FTA in deference to fears of layoffs in hard-pressed US industries.

All hope of ratification of the FTA by the US Congress, as Koreans have been told repeatedly, would vanish if US beef is banned by South Korea.