Koreans protest import of American Beef

Just about the entire European Union has been affected by Mad Cow disease.

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Democracy Now

May 30, 2008

10,000 South Koreans Protest US Beef Imports

In South Korea, more than 10,000 people took to the streets of Seoul Thursday in the latest of daily protests against an agreement on importing US beef. The South Korean government’s decision to ease restrictions has sparked a national crisis.

Protester: “I came here because I got so angry after the minister announced the implementation. I’ve been participating in these rallies, but I think the government pushed it unilaterally without listening to our voices. I can’t
stand it.”

South Korea banned American beef five years ago after an outbreak of mad cow disease. But the ban was lifted earlier this month after US lawmakers threatened to withhold a pending trade deal unless South Korea accepted US beef.

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Holy cow! The mandarin strikes back ... Francis Beckett reads around The Politics of BSE, by Richard Packer From The Guardian, June 30, 2006

Here is information on how Mad Cow Disease affected the United Kingdom:

BSE - mad cow disease - emerged in cattle in 1986, but the government insisted for 10 years that it could not be transmitted to humans and it was safe to eat beef. One agriculture minister, John Selwyn Gummer, invited the press to photograph him feeding beefburgers to his daughter. Then, on March 20 1996, Health Secretary Stephen Dorrell told Parliament that 10 young people had contracted variant CJD, which is always fatal, probably from BSE. By September 2000 there were 80 victims of CJD. Most of them were young. No other country suffered to anything like the same extent.

It wrecked the British beef industry, not least because the European Union banned British beef. The ban, which in 1997 Tony Blair vowed to have removed within months, was only lifted last month. But Sir Richard's story is not that of the illness, nor even its effect on the industry, but, as his title implies, the politics.

By the start of the 1990s, the European Commission was saying that British slaughterhouse standards were not high enough. Yet as late as 1992, Prime Minister John Major was writing to Gummer: "The regulatory burden we are imposing on business frustrates enterprise, innovation and growth . . . We . . . need to look at the new (EU) rules on meat hygiene which have caused alarm to local business . . . "

When Dorrell made his sensational announcement, the Major government panicked. Groups of ministers gathered in meetings whose decisions were reported, mostly accurately, in the same day's Evening Standard, and then changed by a slightly different group. Major decided on a policy of non-cooperation with the EU until it lifted its ban, a policy that Packer and others warned could not succeed, and it did not succeed.

for complete Guardian article click here