US Beef Clearance Suspended Again
by Brendon Carr
Looks like that legal market opening may be delayed; I think the Free Trade Agreement may be a goner. Korea has suspended the import of American beef once again, this time after Cargill was apparently so sloppy they shipped over not just a few bone chips, which were the previous pretextual reasons to reject US beef imports, but a big ol’ section of spine! Mmm, spine.
One would think that a company like Cargill would be more careful, especially knowing that just a few fingernail-sized chips of bone could scuttle import of tons of beef. How could they be so careless?
My suspicion: There is a “patriotic Korean” somewhere in the US (perhaps a friend of these guys) who is deliberately sabotaging US beef exports to Korea (see the ROK Drop blog for some of the evidence in this direction). This person will be found in the next few weeks, but not before the Democratic Congress makes hay over Korea’s record as a trading partner. And this will cloud the prospects for passage of the KORUS FTA. This is a “George Bush” agreement that has to be sold to Congress, and his political credit is eroded to the point where I don’t think he could sell sex to sailors.
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So I’m not the only one with major doubts about the passage of the FTA in the U.S. Unless it’s renegotiated to remove most of the “free trade” components, I don’t think a Democrat-dominated Congress will approve it.
Even with such an explanation, when I tell Koreans that I think the odds of passage are less than 50% they look at me like I’m from another planet.
My hope now is that the legal market will open after the passage of an EU-Korean FTA. The UK firms might even get better terms.