Thu, 19 Jun 2008

South Korean president: No older US beef

Ostensibly, this is to prevent BSE, because symptoms of the disease don't usually appear until the animal is at least three years old. So the logic seems to be, if we eat a diseased cow that shows symptoms, we'll get the disease, but if we eat that same cow before symptoms are apparent we won't.

Huh?

Mad cow disease has nothing to do with the age of the bovine, and everything to do with it's feed regimen. And it's been pretty much established that even if the critter's brain is dripping with BSE, you probably won't get it by eating a sirloin steak cut from it's butt. Brain sandwich = bad, rump roast = good.

I can certainly understand South Koreans concern over this - I'm not a fan of feedlot beef at all: it can be slaughtered in a completely bas-ackward fashion, leading to contamination of even that tasty rump roast with nerve infected nerve tissue. But on the other hand ...

I wish they could understand our concerns about the loss of our electronics industry. There were over 25,000 electronics manufacturing jobs in Indianapolis alone when I got out of the military in 1975 - today there are probably less than 200. A good number of those jobs ended up in South Korea. And that dislocation was every bit as traumatic to our economy as a case of BSE would be to South Korea.

Free trade doesn't describe the current situation. These days, it seems to mean "You can export anything you want to us, but you can restrict our exports to you any way you want as well." In other words, you get to sell us cheap cameras, stereos, TV's and computers, despite our fears of job loss and economic chaos, but we can't sell you cheap beef because you're supposedly afraid you might get sick.

And that's another bovine byproduct: bullshit.

Free trade needs to become fair trade: you don't want our beef? Fine. We don't want your cars. Tit for tat, tariff for tariff. See how long the protests over "mad cows" continues on Korean unemployment lines.

AP - South Korean President Lee Myung-bak pledged to keep U.S. beef out of South Korea unless Washington agrees to ban meat from older cattle, seeking Thursday to defuse a political crisis sparked by health concerns that has derailed his plan to boost U.S. ties and reinvigorate the economy.

(link) [Yahoo! News: Top Stories]

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