Looks like Korea has agreed to resume imports of US beef from May:
South Korea and the United States agreed on the resumption of U.S. beef imports Friday, removing a major hurdle to the U.S. ratification of the Seoul-Washington free trade agreement (FTA).
The agreement, which was announced hours before President Lee Myung-bak’s summit with U.S. President George W. Bush at Camp David, encompasses the U.S. `no-restriction’ policy on the age of cattle and bone parts in beef by practically offering full access to the Korean market.
The revised sanitary condition of meat imports will be enacted within 20 days. Given quarantine and delivery processes, American beef will be marketed in South Korea again late next month at the earliest.
Interestingly, the Chosun Ilbo notes it will be Korean pork producers, not beef producers, that will feel the brunt of this. Sales of Korean hanu beef — which is four times the price of imported US beef — did not increase appreciably following the suspension of US beef imports, while US beef might actually be cheaper than Korean samgyeopsal, especially with pork prices spiking as of late.
Another thing to note is that imported US beef is half the price of Australian beef, and what’s more, US cows are grain-fed rather than grass-fed (as they are in Australia), making the beef fattier and better suited to the Korean palate. In other words, this can’t be good news Down Under.
I haven’t gone through all the editorials, but I did notice this morning the Kyunghyang Shinmun’s front-page headline slamming the “humiliating” agreement. The Hankyoreh headline, meanwhile, noted the explosion of domestic opposition to the agreement, including from within the Grand National Party.
32 Comments
humiliating? such shallow thinking on kyunghyang. this is good news for both countries!
Wonder if we will get any more shit flinging in local stores that choose to sell that brain-melting beef.
I hope my favorite little place in Shinchon decides to go back to American beef…was a sad day way back when the price of the marinated beef BBQ went from 6000 per to 12 000 per overnight.
I don’t think Korean choose Samgeyopsal over US beef by price. It’s the taste of it. And hasn’t imported samgeyopsal already conquered market?
@3
Beef and samgyeopsal are substitute goods — when the imports were banned the demand for samgyeopsal increased quite a bit I would venture. By reintroducing cheap beef - a substitute for samgyeopsal - into the market, there will be a shift away from its consumption (back to beef).
That is what is implied for the pork producers — not direct competition with imported/domestic pork.
And yes, some choose pork over beef anyways… But they were never part of the initial shift.
Where’s Iceberg or Iheartblueballs with their “Housewives not getting enough American beef” remarks?
No more small portions of local expensive beef when they can get some inexpensive, thick, juicy, grain-fed, American beef that housewives just can’t wait to get their lips around? Schweaty Beef?
I guess we can look forward to endless protests and dung flinging from the farmer groups and the leftists.
I don’t think it’s a matter of opening the market but more of a matter of how good the retailers will be at resisting the constant bullying that will come from the groups that want to keep US beef out of Korea.
The Australian beef on offer at Costco since the ban on US beef was imposed is advertised as “pure grain-fed”, which I always understood as a subtle attempt to suggest (the now long-discontinued) US practice of feeding cattle beef and sheep offal, from whence the BSE problem first arose.
Does anyone know if cefquinome is used on beef and pork animals in Korea?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/.....01311.html
You mean cows and pigs?
I mean cows and pigs raised for meat consumption.
#4 yes for sure there will be shift but I was told by my friend who is importing pork saying that samgeyopsal can’t just meet it’s ever inversing demand and he is not much worrying about US beef as he could find cheap one everywhere
Ever increasing…….. Is it BlueBerry or my typing?
‘No more small portions of local expensive beef when they can get some inexpensive, thick, juicy, grain-fed, American beef that housewives just can’t wait to get their lips around? Schweaty Beef?’
uh-oh, yet another ugly white guy with a chip on his shoulder. so boring. so cliche.
“so boring. so cliche”.
Oh, the irony.
Apparently, according to the Chosun and the Dong-A, if US beef is good enough for the kyopos then it’s good enough for the Koreans;
http://news.chosun.com/site/da.....01346.html
http://www.donga.com/fbin/outp.....0804190154
I’m surprised that U.S. beef has so far avoided public controversy in Korea over the hormone and antibiotic injections that U.S. cows receive. That, plus the fact that they are grain-fed rather than grass-fed, significantly reduces the nutritional value of the beef and actually creates a health risk. I don’t care how “cheap” such beef gets, I’m not going to buy it. You get what you pay for.
The following article that explains why it is better to purchase meat from grass-fed livestock:
http://www.westonaprice.org/farming/splendor.html
–US cows are grain-fed rather than grass-fed (as they are in Australia)
Robert, I think you’ve got it backwards. US cows are generally grass-fed. (They do spend the last month of their life on feed lots to fatten them up, but that doesn’t affect that taste as much as if they had a grain diet their whole life)
My father is a cattle rancher in the US, and I’ve lived in Australia. There is certainly a difference in taste.
There are cows raised for meat and cows raised to give milk, but are there any other reasons to raise a pig other than for consumption? Even in the case of dairy cows, antibiotics may be present in the milk, so the concern applies to all cows.
Korea doesn’t have much pasture, and any visit to the countryside will confirm that Korean cows are grain-fed. As for hormones and antibiotics, the latter are almost certainly used and the former probably, which would explain why Korean farmers and civic groups haven’t siezed upon those issues.
Your explanation makes sense, Sonagi. Thanks. Although, if Korean farmers already do this, there is even less excuse for the outrageous pricing. Guess I’ll keep sticking to Australian beef until further notice.
If Australian beef is an option, but I don’t think pastured pork or chicken is available in Korea. When I buy grain-fed meats, I slow cook them in a bit of water, refrigerate overnight, and then skim the fat off the top. The tender meat with a little broth makes a very nice base for a stirfry. You probably know that US pork and chicken is hormone-free by law. I don’t know about Korea.
“There are cows raised for meat and cows raised to give milk, but are there any other reasons to raise a pig other than for consumption?”
Companionship?
“Even in the case of dairy cows, antibiotics may be present in the milk, so the concern applies to all cows.”
I know, but I was under the impression (which may be wrong) that the need for fast-growing beef and pork animals meant they were exposed to even more antibiotics like Cefquinome than dairy cows.
I asked about it because many scientists (including the AMA) are worried that use of Cefquinome in cows and pigs that will be consumed may lead to bacteria resistant to Cefquinome, which is a last-line-of-defense drug.
I was going to qualify my statement by excluding unusual pets but didn’t think it necessary since there are so few relative to livestock.
It’s the hormones that make the animals grow and yield more milk, not antibiotics. Those are needed to combat all the illnesses that proliferate when animals are crammed together in stuffy barns and fed grains which make the cow’s stomachs more acidic and thus hospitable to E-coli and other bacteria. You are correct that dairy cows get fewer antibiotics as it is banned from their feed.
In any case, I share your concern about antibiotic use in animals and the fact that our government approves the use of new antibiotics in spite of opposition from medical experts.
Big Ag f*ckers actually managed to get Pennsylania’s Department of Agriculture to ban labeling milk as hormone-free, ironic since Big Ag couches its opposition to restrictive government regulation of pesticide, hormones, GMO, and the like by defending the consumer’s right to choose. Read the Dept. of Ag. BS rationale for its law here:
http://www.agriculture.state.p.....ds_new.pdf
You know, that Mad Cow disease is scary sh*t. They shouldn’t let bovine protein anywhere NEAR cattle feed.
Not only does it melt your brain, but you can’t kill it during cooking because it’s not a virus or a bacteria. It’s some sort of inorganic crystal that kills brain cells. You open up someone’s head who has it and parts of the brain look like black goo. Furthermore, it can stay dormant in your body for decades. Thus, there could of been a problem with the meat dozens of years ago, but a population wouldn’t know it until much later.
We might learn a few decades in the future, this problem may have been more widespread then previously thought.
Again, they shouldn’t let bovine protein ANYWHERE near beef livestock.
#23,
Very unlikely. It’s not as if it’s something that suddenly popped out of nowhere. For the feed to have the prions, the carcass of the cow that was used to produce the feed would have had to have been infected. If I were you, I’d be more concerned about heart disease if I ate beef.
That didn’t seem to faze them during the Great Alar Scare a few years ago. They just didn’t tell the Korean public that they were spraying that and a lot of other shit as well.
Perhaps that would require Korean aggies to look at their own practices, one of which is continued use of clenbuterol to add muscle gain to immobilized animals. If you’ve ever seen large, muscled hanu on the farm, the fact that they’re basically immobilized should raise a red flag. As well, hanu that has the spiderweb-shaped fatty strands (as in better cuts of ggot deungsim) running through it is usually indicative of the use of this drug.
Yikes! One more reason why I’m glad to be back in the US. Organic produce and grains can be bought in large supermarkets and specialty stores in Korea. What about clean meat?
Ah, Hanu - the Arnold Schwarzenegger of beef
Odd, though, that you associate clenbuterol with the fat strands in beef tissue. In the human body building game, chemical division, clenbuterol is among the gear used as a fat burner. It is tailored to affect the B2 adrenoreceptors in order to eliminate intra-muscular fat (along with other kinds) and showcase the sort of lean tissue striations that start to appear when fat gets very low. I suspect that its use in animals is primarily intended to accelerate lean muscle mass growth with minimal fat gain. The (one?) problem w/ clenbuterol is that it has a very short half-life; efficacy requires continuous use of massive doses. It’s a sort of open secret in the Korean iron set about those gyms around town with a little room where you can get injected if you’re interested.
May not be fat but muscle strands. I had a brief tutorial on the stuff by a pharmaco guy who had worked with the stuff throughout Africa and Asia. As we went through the beef cooler at Lotte, the more expensive cuts with a specific pattern of marbling were pieces produced from clenbuterol-fed animals. I had remembered it as fatty tissue, although it could have been the way the muscle cut through the fat?
The US Trade Representative is using South Korea’s lifting of the beef ban to pressure Japan to lift its sister ban:
The United States urged Japan on Friday to eliminate all controls on U.S. beef imports linked to the prevention of mad cow disease and to fully open its market despite renewed fears in Japan about the safety of U.S. beef.
The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative made the pitch in its annual report on global trade after South Korea decided earlier in the month to relax import rules for U.S. beef.
http://search.japantimes.co.jp.....427a2.html
One Trackback
[...] singer turned actor had a chance to visit any of the local restaurants to chow down on some LA Galbi, given that some of his fellow celebrities would rather gulp [...]