ROK Accountability
Aside from the criminally atrocious job ROK president Lee Myung-bak did preparing the South Korean public for the the sale of US beef, Daniel Altman chews the beef pretty thoroughly.
Not only has reason apparently gone out the barn window, but this debate may also be obscuring more important issues.
Mad cow disease occurs extremely rarely in any country's beef, and only a couple of cases have ever been documented in American beef. Moreover, there are no widely accepted cases of someone contracting the deadly human form of the disease from eating American beef. Nor is this a sanitation issue. Korea imports plenty of beef from Mexico, whose sanitation standards are no higher than those of the United States. And if you've ever seen a rice paddy dotted with debris from a rubbish-strewn road nearby, as I have several times in Korea (to be fair, a country of much natural beauty as well), then the food safety protests may seem a little sanctimonious.
But Korea has its own beef farmers, and their costs are relatively high. As several newspaper articles here have openly admitted, they need protection - at least during the transition to a freer trade regime. That's not what the protesters are seeking, though; they want to renegotiate the agreement to ban the beef. Opposition politicians are fanning the flames of fear, while government officials are still wrangling in private over other heavily lobbying industries, like autos. Americans seem to think that they could sell a ton of cars in Korea, if only the government here would make it easier for foreign brands to open dealerships. Yet Koreans are incredibly nationalistic, and I doubt they'd switch to American cars unless the quality-to-price ratio was vastly higher… which seems unlikely. Either way, this has ceased to be an argument about economics - if it ever was one in the first place.
This episode reminds me of Rousseau's point about how leaders need to lead by example, not just educate their citizens. I'm really sick to tears of hearing the phrase, American beef, in Korean on bus and taxi radios and on TV. Even my wife lost it one morning, that she was sick of politicians merely apologizing, and not doing the right thing first.
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