SEOUL - South Korean activists have
another bone to chew on just when it seemed they
had lost all traction in their battle against the
new conservatism of the government of President
Lee Myung-bak.
They have found an
emotion-packed issue in the deal under which Lee's
government yielded to US pressure and agreed to
remove the barrier to the import of US beef that
was banned after a single cow was diagnosed with
"mad cow" disease in the US five years ago.
Just when Lee seemed to have overcome
every obstacle on the way to strengthening ties
with the United States, tens of thousands of young
Koreans in recent days have been hitting
the
streets of downtown Seoul to
protest the deal for South Korea to resume imports
of US beef, beginning on May 15.
The
outpouring has so alarmed authorities that the
police have taken the unusual step of banning
candlelit vigils that have become a motif of
Korean protests ever since crowds swarmed into
central Seoul in late 2002 after the deaths of two
schoolgirls crushed by a US army armored vehicle
during a military exercise north of the capital.
The ban on vigils, though, may elicit
still more protests, legal or not, from organizers
of the anti-beef rallies.
"People are
feeling a sense of crisis about what they eat,"
anti-beef zealot Kim Jin-il told Korean
journalists. "If the government tries to
forcefully ban their rallies, the protest will
become even fiercer."
The protest gained
in intensity after Munwha Broadcasting Company
carried a program showing some of the horrors of
beef slaughter in the US and bloggers joined the
crusade. Opposition politicians have seized on the
issue, denouncing the cozy relationship between
Lee and President George W Bush, as seen in their
recent Camp David summit, and the US-Korea free
trade agreement that farmers in South Korea
passionately oppose.
Agriculture Minister
Chung Woon-chun did not seem to have helped
matters by pronouncing US beef "safe to eat" and
declaring claims the food could be deadly were
"groundless".
His mistake may have been to
say the danger of catching "mad cow" disease was
"extremely slim". The inference, said a
demonstrator, was that, yes, you really did have a
"slim chance" of dying from American beef.
While police try to hold back the
demonstrators, Lee and his ministers are revving
up their campaign to convince Koreans that it is
all right to import American beef, just as Korea
imports beef from Australia and New Zealand.
Bulgoki and kalbi, two popular
barbecue dishes, are such favorites that Korea was
a prime market - the third largest - for US beef
before the ban, with annual imports of US$850
million.
Richard Raymond, US under
secretary of agriculture for food safety, tried to
assuage concerns, saying Korean inspectors were
welcome to audit US beef production. The chances
of "mad cow" disease were "zero", he said,
especially since the agreement calls for the
removal of "specified risk materials", including
spines and brains through which the disease is
known to have been carried in England.
One
compelling argument for US beef is that Australian
and New Zealand beef is often cheaper than the
beef produced in South Korea and an onslaught
would drive prices further down. The obverse of
that argument, of course, is that farmers fear the
competition.
Protesters have summoned the
same dramatic moments in protesting US beef
imports that they have displayed in denouncing the
US-South Korea alliance or sending South Korean
troops to Iraq and Afghanistan.
Cartoons
of crazy cows and caricatures of Lee and Bush
appear above crowds of young people holding
candles in paper cups, singing old songs with new
lyrics mocking the beef agreement, the Bush-Lee
summit and the US-Korean alliance.
"I want
to go to heaven, I don't want to die of mad cow
disease," said one sign, in rough translation from
Korean.
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. No argument
will convince them that the FTA is likely to bring
far more income into South Korea than is possible
while tariffs and quotas hold down US imports into
Korea and exports from Korea to the US.
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.
Failure
to ratify the agreement would have wide
repercussions. The US would stick to its promise
not to reduce the number of US troops stationed in
South Korea below the current level of 28,000 or
so, but talks on other issues, including transfer
of operational military control in war time, would
be strained.
At the same time, the Lee
government would lose support at home on efforts
at economic reform and also, possibly, for its
firm line toward North Korea, including demands
for "reciprocity", complete abandonment by the
North of its nuclear program and "verification" of
whatever the North claims to have done about it.
The great debate over food imports,
meanwhile, suggests the richness of the diet of a
people accustomed to overflowing food markets at
relatively low prices. You can buy an all-around
healthy meal, with vegetables and fresh meat and
fish, for the same prices you pay for fast food in
the US, where visitors go miles to find
restaurants that serve equally healthy food at far
higher prices. Koreans tend to forget how the food
available in the South compares with that in North
Korea, where small handouts of donated rice
provide a lifeline for millions on the verge of
starvation.
Some have suggested, however,
that US beef exporters divert their products to
North Korea as donations, just as the late Hyundai
founder, Chung Ju-yung, led 1,000 cows across the
demilitarized zone from South to North Korea 10
years ago. Just what happened to those cows
remains mystery, but the widespread suspicion is
they were slaughtered for beef for the North's
elite.
No one doubts, however, that North
Korea would welcome handouts from anywhere, while
activists lead protests against US beef in hopes
of reviving anti-American sentiments to satiate
the appetite of the only overweight North Korean,
Dear Leader Kim Jong-il.
Journalist
Donald Kirk has been covering
Korea - and the confrontation of forces in
Northeast Asia - for more than 30
years.
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